What is your turn-around time for uploading ETDs?

[Jason Skoog]

Hello,

What is your turn-around time for uploading ETDS to your repository? We are a small university. We receive around 100 ETDs a year (not all at once). I try to have them uploaded within a week, but I'm thinking of increasing the time it takes. I usually don't tell the students when they will be uploaded, but just say "in the near future." I find that students are mostly concerned if they have completed all their submission requirements, but not as concerned about having them uploaded right away.

[Rhonda Marker]

Hi Jason,

We publish our promised processing times in a LibGuide. May and October graduation dates are the busiest, so they have longer processing times. For our August date (fewer than 100 ETDs), we allow about six weeks. For our January date (usually over 100 but fewer than 200), we allow two months. Only the May graduation date has an official date, commencement day - we have three of them. For the others, the "graduation" date is the last day of the month.

We could do 100 in a week, but the folks who process ETDs have other responsibilities, which often can't be set aside. And life happens.

Rhonda

Rhonda Marker (she/her)

Head, Open Knowledge Strategies

Rutgers University Libraries

169 College Ave.

New Brunswick, NJ 08901

848-932-6127

Currently reading: Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future / Neil Shubin (Dutton, 2025)

---

From: Jason Skoog <jaskoo...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2026 10:07 AM
To: ETD <e...@ndltd.org>
Subject: [etd] What is your turn-around time for uploading ETDs?

 

Hello,

What is your turn-around time for uploading ETDS to your repository? We are a small university. We receive around 100 ETDs a year (not all at once). I try to have them uploaded within a week, but I'm thinking of increasing the time it takes. I usually don't tell the students when they will be uploaded, but just say "in the near future." I find that students are mostly concerned if they have completed all their submission requirements, but not as concerned about having them uploaded right away.

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[Brian Sheppard]

We piggy-back off the ProQuest submission service and receive submission packages on a local SFTP server. Those are then processed nightly and ingested into our Fedora digital repository, with stubbed-out MARC records being sent to catalogers. Once supplemented/edited, those records are loaded into our discovery system. That may take a few weeks.

But the actual PDFs and any supplementary files are effectively world-accessible immediately — the only exceptions being ETDs that are under embargo.

We average about 900 ETDs per year.

> On Feb 17, 2026, at 9:07 AM, Jason Skoog <jaskoo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> What is your turn-around time for uploading ETDS to your repository? We are a small university. We receive around 100 ETDs a year (not all at once). I try to have them uploaded within a week, but I'm thinking of increasing the time it takes. I usually don't tell the students when they will be uploaded, but just say "in the near future." I find that students are mostly concerned if they have completed all their submission requirements, but not as concerned about having them uploaded right away.
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ETD" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to etd+uns...@ndltd.org.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/ndltd.org/d/msgid/etd/b9d87693-4fb8-406a-9142-d672dbf9f220n%40ndltd.org.

—————————————————————————————
Brian Sheppard
Digital Library Analyst
UW Digital Collections Center
brian.s...@wisc.edu

[Bailey, Jody Elizabeth]

Hi Jason,

Here’s how it works in our system.

1. Students log into our platform, create all the metadata for their ETD, upload their files (primary and supplementary documents, if any) to our repository themselves, and select the embargo time their advisor or committee chair has approved (if any).
2. The records are then slotted into a review queue that is not visible to the public.
3. ETD approvers from the various schools whose students submit an ETD log into the system, access their review queue, review the records, and request revisions as needed. Students are automatically notified if revisions are required. They do the revisions. Approvers are automatically notified that they need to review the record again. Approvers approve the record.
4. Students graduate.
5. We get a report from the registrar the first Friday of the month after graduation. One of our IT colleagues runs that report in our ETD platform, and records of the students who officially graduated are published. This usually ends up being around 6 weeks after graduation. Embargoes are applied automatically, but metadata is always visible.

Best,

Jody

Jody Bailey, MA, MLIS (she, her)

Head, Scholarly Communications Office

Emory University

jody....@emory.edu

Schedule a meeting with me

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4226-4173

I sometimes work flexibly and send emails outside normal office hours. 

No need to respond to my emails outside yours.

 

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[Kimberly Chapman]

Hi Jason, 

We average ~800 ETDs per year. Like Brian's institution, we also piggy-back off the ProQuest submission service and receive submission packages on a local SFTP server. ETDs are transmitted all year round, so we batch-ingest ETDs into our DSpace instance on a monthly basis (sometimes twice per month during peak times). The batch ingest preparation takes about 2-6 hours per month with applying embargoes as the most time-consuming element of the process (this includes time spent communicating with our Graduate College when we have received inconsistent embargo information from the student). After each batch ingest, we now run a process that completes ingest to our preservation infrastructure as well. ETDs no longer go through a cataloging process; the repository records are harvested into our (Primo) discovery system weekly, and into the WorldCat Digital Collections Gateway monthly.

All best,

Kimberly Chapman

University of Arizona Libraries