Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Status Report for 2001 Paul A. Soderdahl University of Iowa Libraries IACON 2001, Buena Vista University June 1, 2001

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2 What are ETDs? “Electronic Theses and Dissertations” –Submitted to Graduate College in electronic format –Made available to research community in electronic format –Is it in electronic format throughout its life? Not now Will it ever be?

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 3 Why ETDs? Student demand Improved access for researchers –Full text Relevant for students who are moving into scholarly publishing –Electronic submissions expected Thesis writing as “learning process” Demonstrated increased usage

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 4 Why ETDs? Probably not… Reduce paper Reduce life cycle costs –Printing, binding, shelving, etc. Improve preservation

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5 Why ETDs? Possibilities beyond print Audio Video Animation Simulation Hypertext

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 6 Life cycle of an ETD Ideally… ETD is a fluid electronic document Stays in electronic format throughout student creation, revision, advisor feedback, committee review, thesis guideline check, final editing, thesis defense, final submission, archiving, added to ETD library

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 7 Life cycle of an ETD Real world… Electronic, print, electronic, print, print, print, print, electronic, print, electronic, print, electronic, electronic, ….

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8 Stakeholders Student candidate Faculty Graduate College Library Academic Computing

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 9 Format Options HTML PDF SGML XML LaTeX Word, WordPerfect, etc.

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 10 Format Options HTML (open standard) PDF (owned by Adobe, permission) SGML (open standard) XML (open standard) LaTeX (open standard) Word, WordPerfect, etc. (proprietary)

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 11 Format Options Advantages of PDF Perfect electronic representation of a print artifact Widely accepted –For ETDs –Throughout publishing industry Easy, easy, easy –Can use any document editor and print

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 12 Format Options Advantages of XML Open standard endorsed by W3C Extensible Can embed anything –PDF comes close Focus on structure, not presentation –Structured search and retrieval

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 13 Format Options Formats accepted by University of Iowa XML –JPEG –MPEG –Proprietary formats may be included as long as ETD can stand alone without them

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 14 Format Options Formats excepted everywhere else in the U.S. PDF

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 15 Internationally Estimated 9,000 ETDs now published Large percentage are North American Early U.S. adopters: –Virginia Tech –UT Austin Several U.S. universities now accept theses and dissertations only as ETDs

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 16 What’s happening in Iowa University of Iowa –Accepts master’s and doctoral dissertations in XML with print summary –Pilot ?? Iowa State University –Accepts CD-ROM theses with print summary when subject matter warrants Maharishi International University –Post PhD abstracts; link to UMI and author

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 17 University of Iowa ETD Implementation Team ETD Technical Committee –Graduate College –University Libraries –Information Technology Services

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 18 University of Iowa Settled on XML for 1st and 2nd pilot –Open standard –Structural markup –Needed to develop DTD: Document Type Definition CSS: Cascading Style Sheet –Existing XML markup definitions determined too arcane

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 19 University of Iowa XML issues –No editor of choice Create in Word Convert to RTF then to XML Clean up in primitive XML editor –No national/international standard for ETDs –Perceived as added burden for “plain old vanilla” theses and dissertations –Difficulty scaling

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 20 ETD Issues: Technology Determining acceptable formats Requirements for access and search Preservation issues, reformatting –What to guarantee in perpetuity –What to allow to go stale Preparing for forward-compatibility Transient elements, e.g., URLs

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 21 ETD Issues: Workflow Thesis requirements / guidelines –Created for print documents –Can translate to PDF artifacts; more difficulty to apply to structured XML Where to provide access, searching –Role of UMI Restricted vs. unrestricted access

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 22 ETD Issues: Intellectual Copyright issues –Widely visible in electronic world Untested applications of fair use for multimedia Licensing issues Prior publication issues Patent and national security issues Intellectual property issues

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 23 Consortial Efforts NDLTD –Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations –International in scope –Efforts at cooperation Sharing resources, experiences –Beginning efforts at establishing standards

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 24 Standards Work ETD-MS –Electronic Theses and Dissertations Metadata Set –Final draft of metadata elements –Based on Dublin Core –Special application of Dublin Core to capture elements unique to ETDs

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 25 Standards Work NDLTD Union Collection –Merged collection of metadata –Harvest metadata from ETD providers OAI: Open Archives Initiative –Federated search

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 26 Standards Work Name Authority Control –Relationship to Library of Congress’ Name Authority Control file –OCLC proposal for more distributed name authority work Addition of student authors Addition of faculty committees

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 27 Standards Work ETD DTD for XML –Document Type Definition –Established standards for markup tags HTML not sufficient TEI too arcane –CIC (Big Ten Universities) beginning effort at establishing ETD DTD to share among CIC institutions

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 28 Market Competition Dissertation.com –“Academic and Scholarly Publishers of University Graduate Theses and Dissertations” –In association with Amazon.com –Author royalties –Commercial publisher

June 1, 2001Electronic Theses and Dissertations 29 Broader Issue Role of ETDs in the larger world of digital library resources –Standards development –Metadata harvesting –Federated search and retrieval Critical in future direction of ETDs –Distilling out what is truly ETD issue

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