Cataloguing Theses and Dissertations: Designing an Integrated Processing and Retrieval System

Theses and dissertations in print and electronic format are valuable academic resources. These resources must be available to scholars. Library catalogues serve as resource discovery tools to find these valuable academic documents. In view of the importance of organization and access to these resources, this paper explores cataloguing of theses and dissertations and its retrieval along with other types of documents in an integrated processing environment. The software framework that provides integrated processing and retrieval environment is based on open source software and open standards. Designing of the framework takes into consideration shortcomings of the popular library automation software implemented in India.