A Study on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) and Related Issues in University Libraries of India Abhijit Chatterjee University Research Fellow Department of Library and Information Science University of Calcutta & Dr. Arabinda Maiti Assistant Professor

Introduction Research and development activities are always key concern for any country for their overall development. A number of fund granting agencies are there in our country like CSIR, NASSDOC, DESIDOC, SENDOC, UGC, ICAR, DBT, ICMR etc. In the last few decades the Government strengthened ICT and research infrastructure in most of the reputed Indian institutions, where access to knowledge resources and laboratory facilities are adequate to students, research scholars and faculty members. But there is no such provision of preservation and maintenance of scholarly communication. Electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) initiative is one such effort through which preservation and access of theses and dissertations become possible for the users.

Research Output in India

Research Output in India

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Concept Benefits Issues of ETD Format Facilities Required Software Role of the faculty and review process Copyright Access Storage and preservations Plagiarism

ETD Preservation Scenario in India

Indian Initiatives UGC Regulation: In UGC Regulations, 2005 it is clearly mentioned that for maintaining systematic creation, collection and compilation of cataloguing information, herein after called “metadata” of doctoral theses in a standardized format and to commence the process of submission of theses in electronic format, herein after called e-theses, in all universities. National Knowledge Commission Recommendations: ‘Report to the Nation 2006’ NKC strongly advocates Peer-reviewed research papers resulting from publicly funded research should also be made available through open access channels, subject to copyright regulations. Online Catalogue of Indian Universities (Indcat): This union database of Theses covers the bibliographic Metadata of Doctoral Theses submitted to 235 Universities/Institutes in India. It has over 2,38,390 unique records from all subject areas. CSIR Exploration: CSIR Explorations is a digital library of electronic dissertations, theses and research reports of the fellowships and projects supported by CSIR. Outside users can easily access the abstract of the theses. There are 659 theses whose abstracts and 1477 e-Theses Bibliographies are available on the CSIR Exploration gateway.

Indian Initiatives Krishi Prabha: KrishiPrabha is a full-text database of Indian Agricultural Doctoral Dissertations submitted by research scholars to the 45 State/Deemed Agricultural Universities during the period from 1.1.2000 to 31.12.2007. This database, listing about 7500 Doctoral Dissertations with a full text of about 6000 Dissertations, has been created by Nehru Library, Ch. Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar with financial support from Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi under its National Agricultural Innovation Project. Vidyanidhi: It is India's premier Digital library initiative to facilitate the creation, archiving and accessing of doctoral theses. Vidyanidhi is an information infrastructure, a digital library, a portal of resources, tools and facilities for doctoral research in India. Vidyanidhi is envisioned to evolve as a national repository and a consortium for e-theses through participation and partnership with universities, academic institutions and other stake holders. It hosts more than 500 full text and 50,000 bibliographic records of theses submitted to the universities in India . Currently Vidyanidhi have 15,000 records in Hindi and 600 records in Kannada. The project is sponsored by NISSAT, DSIR Govt. of India, Ford Foundation and Microsoft India.

Indian Initiatives Sodhganga: The Shodhganga, INFLIBNET Centre provides a platform for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access. The repository has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate and preserve ETDs submitted by the researchers. The centre set-up using DSpace, an open source digital repository software developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in partnership between Hewlett-Packard (HP). In this short span of time 49 universities signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad. Following table shows the contribution of different universities in Sodhganga and all these theses are available freely.

Conclusion The intellectual outputs of the researchers must be preserved in the form of ETDs and the main aim is to avoid the duplication of research work in any field of studies. But the main concern is the plagiarism of the research work. The authorities should be careful enough to look this matter seriously. The issues involved in creation and maintenance of ETDs should be considered carefully. There is also need to grow awareness among the professionals in this issue. Government has already taken some valuable policy decisions and some initiative but there is need to some rigorous effort by all ETD stakeholders to integrate theses and dissertations produced in Indian universities.

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