TCDL 2026

Vireo Roadmap
By: Christopher Starcher & Frank Smutniak

As Vireo continues to serve as a core system in established ETD workflows, the project is entering a phase focused on intentional planning for long-term sustainability. This session focuses on the Vireo roadmap as a strategic tool and framework for ensuring the project remains technically viable, community-supported, and adaptable to changing institutional environments.

We will explore how upcoming development priorities are being shaped by future-oriented concerns, including stack longevity, reduction of technical debt, and architectural decisions that make the system easier to maintain, deploy, and extend over time. Planned work emphasizes modularity, clearer separation between core functionality and local customization, and improved integration patterns that allow Vireo to evolve alongside repository platforms, identity systems, and broader research infrastructure without requiring disruptive redesign.

Sustainability is also a governance and community challenge. The roadmap incorporates efforts to make contribution pathways more accessible, documentation more actionable, and shared development more predictable. By strengthening testing practices, release processes, and extension points, the project aims to distribute knowledge and effort across institutions rather than concentrating it in a few places.

Attendees will gain insight into how Vireo’s future is being actively designed, how priorities are selected, and how technical and organizational sustainability are being treated as first-order goals. The session invites institutions to see themselves not only as users of Vireo, but as long-term stewards of a shared platform.

Amplifying Student’s Scholarly Output by Registering References
By: Mark Phillips

Over the past year, the University of North Texas Libraries has expanded the visibility and impact of graduate student scholarship by integrating Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) into broader scholarly communication and citation networks. This initiative includes assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to ETDs published since 1999 and registering them with Crossref.

Beyond DOI registration, the Libraries have extracted reference lists from ETDs and deposited those references into the corresponding Crossref records. This step, which is a common practice for journal articles, books, and conference proceedings enables ETDs to participate more fully in global citation infrastructure. By contributing reference data, UNT makes dissertation scholarship discoverable through tools and services that power “cited by” and “referenced by” features across scholarly databases and open citation systems.

Although ETDs represent significant original research, relatively few institutions currently register dissertation references with Crossref. UNT’s work helps position graduate research on more equal footing with other forms of scholarly output while also increasing visibility for faculty advisors and committee members whose work is cited within these documents.

his presentation will outline UNT’s end-to-end workflow, including DOI creation, large-scale reference extraction from ETDs, metadata preparation, and reference deposit to Crossref. We will also discuss how this enriched metadata supports downstream integration with open scholarly knowledge graphs and citation services such as OpenAlex, as well as lessons learned, challenges, and opportunities for other institutions interested in similar efforts.

Co-author: Daniel Alemneh, Supervisor, Digital Curation Unit, University of North Texas Libraries