This recommendation is based on the study report "A PORTAL FOR DOCTORAL E-THESES IN EUROPE; Lessons Learned from a Demonstrator Project"
This study is aiming at generic scholarly communication services harvesting OAI_DC. For context specific e-theses services we recommend to use other metadata schemas besides OAI_DC where all aspects concerning e-theses are offered.
Common practice when using OAI_DC dc:type with the content "info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis", is that very close attention must be paid to following:

• The dc:date field must always contain the date of publication (not the date of the defense. The defense date is meaningful in the specific context of e-theses services)
• Use only one date field. More date fields will be considered ambiguous, because DC has no room to specify other types of dates.
• The dc:contributor field always must contain the name of the supervisor. (Using contributor fields with names of other roles will be considered ambiguous. DC has no room to specify other contributor roles.)
• The rest of the fields should follow the DRIVER Guidelines exactly. Please pay attention to the dc:language field that it is preferably encoded in iso639-3. Also note that the dc:identifier is the only field that contains a URL that points to a full text thesis document or intermediate page with open access to the full text thesis document. The dc:date field must be ISO8601 (YYYY-MM-DD). And the dc:creator and dc:contributor fields are formatted in "lastname, firstname" style.

Example

In this section an example is given for an electronic thesis. In this case it is a "Habilitation" a German type of thesis that is used when a person becomes a Professor. This is an academic work that is even rated higher than a PhD / Doctoral thesis in Germany. In the DRIVER Guidelines we only support the terms used in the Bologna convention, so the repository manager can use the rule "everything equal and higher then a Doctoral thesis will be put in the category doctoralThesis". In the DRIVER Guidelines it is allowed to put the extra information "habilitation" in order to keep the local levels.
For more information on the Diplom level terms see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplom
The XML that is used could look like the following:

the comments between <!-- and --> should not be in the output XML, but serve as a reading aid.

<oai_dc:dc >
  <dc:title>Mixing Oil and Water : </dc:title>

  <dc:creator>Stage, Jesper</dc:creator>                     <!-- The Author -->

  <dc:date>2003-12-02</dc:date>                              <!-- The Published Date, one data field -->

  <dc:contributor>Crane, Walter</dc:contributor>             <!-- The Supervisor -->

  <dc:type>info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis</dc:type>   <!-- DRIVER type 2.0 for doctoral thesis,
                                                                  used for interoperability -->

  <dc:type>habilitation</dc:type>                            <!-- Local specific term.
                                                                  In Germany Habilitation is the thesis
                                                                  a Professor has to write -->

  <dc:type>info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion</dc:type> <!-- Optional, the status of the work -->

  <dc:identifier>http://some.url.to/the_jump-off_page.html</dc:identifier>
  ...
</oai_dc:dc>