Abstract:

The paper describes the national project of the central harvesting of bachelor and master theses for the purpose of the verification of their originality. The project under the official title The Central Register of the Theses has started in 2008 and the system itself has been launched in spring 2010. The central register serves as an integrating system for acquisition, archiving and originality checking of the theses from academic information systems of Slovak universities. The first stage of its development and realization has been devoted to the tasks accompanying the process of harvesting and archiving electronic versions of theses. The research and development of the anti-plagiarism system and the control of the theses in this system is the subsequent stage of this project. The authors of this paper are members of the project team and have intensively participated in the process of methodology design and development. The first part of the paper describes methodology of the theses harvesting on the national and university level.
The Ministry of Education of the Slovak republic released a set of methodical directives in the previous year that unify procedures of theses harvesting from different universities in Slovak republic. Some universities, participants of this project, have had to change their own processes associated with the harvesting and archiving of electronic versions of the theses. Of course, these changes have raised many students’ and academic staff’s questions. This situation has led to the development of the helpdesk designed for all stakeholders at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. The helpdesk has provided relevant and digestedly prepared tutorials and discussion forum about above-mentioned changes.
The activities of the users have been monitored for the purpose of the further processing and identification of the weaknesses of the theses harvesting at the university level. The second part of the paper deals with the usage analysis of the presented helpdesk and the segmentation method of its users. The segmentation method is based on the monitoring of the users’ activities in discussion forums, their searching techniques in available information sources and asking questions about theses finalization, harvesting and archiving. More than 1000 individual users have visited the helpdesk and the authors analyze some aspects of their behaviours. The authors discuss about interesting findings of the usage analysis of the helpdesk and give several recommendations for changes in the stakeholder awareness and in the structure of published information materials.

Keywords:

theses archiving, theses harvesting, user segmentation.