Some issues in the Shodhganga – A theses repository from India

Abstract

Shodhganga theses repository, a cooperative effort between universities and INFLIBNET has a digital collection of over 460000 theses. Metadata from Shodhganga on the theses on Marathi literature was downloaded to study the trends in this area of knowledge. While carrying out this study, many flaws in the metadata and relevant files on Shodhganga were noticed. Time lag in the submissions of theses by the participating Universities, duplicate records for one document, nonadherence to the cataloguing standards while entering metadata, absence of abstracts and apt keywords for the document being described, attributing theses to wrong departments/subject areas, garbled text in metadata and files, identification of similarity between items conferred with a degree and inconsistencies in the rendering of full-text file names and linking incorrect documents were noticed. This study showcases such specific examples from within the repository and suggests some solutions and reccomendations to avoid the flaws in the repository.