ETD 2004 Presentation Abstracts (first set)
Title: Planning and Implementation
of the ETD Initiative at Brigham Young University
Authors: C. Selby Herrin, Bill Lund and Scott J. Eldredge
Abstract:
Title: Electronic Theses and Dissertations
(ETD): An initiative at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Authors: Mr. Mahendra N. Jadhav and Niranjana J. Bamane
Abstract:
With the advancement in computerization and telecommunication, the central library,
IITB has been providing state-of-the-art electronic facility to its users. The
trend is, towards digitizing traditional resources to e-resources. Realizing
digital revolution, Central library IITB undertook the work of ETD to provide
access to research carried out at the Institute, to their students. The research
is carried out at Masters and Doctorate level. In order to differentiate the
research carried out at Masters Level, it is called as Dissertation and at Doctorate
level it is called as Thesis. The Institute has established ETD as a signatory
to the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) initiated
with the Virginia Tech. University as leader of this worldwide project. Since
January 1999, IITB has introduced first of its kind in India, ‘Online
Submission of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD)’ of M. Tech. and
Ph. D. students in addition to its printed copy. It is mandatory to submit full
text and one page of abstract for post graduate students. The work of creating
a database of M. Tech. Dissertations and Ph. D. Theses through online submission
of ETD was meticulously implemented and successfully accomplished. The paper
primarily focuses on the work of digitization of ETD. The process of digitizing
has been bifurcated into:
Title: FACULTY PERCEPTIONS
DURING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ELECTRONIC THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
Authors: Ursula Goldsmith
Abstract:
Electronic theses and dissertations are a recent concept for academia. This
is a presentation about a study of a flag ship university located in the southern
portion of the United States and a Carnegie Doctoral/Research University –
Extensive university. Planning is crucial for success. Alleviating and identifying
likely problems and working through concerns just prior to implementation helped
reduce some of faculty and administrative concerns about the process and what
it might mean to them in their careers and everyday academic life. This study
is being used as a bench mark and therefore targeted the first day of the semester
and surveyed only those faculty who have masters and/or doctoral students as
advisees. One must realize the problems of coordinating from an administrative
point of view with the diverse disciplines and variety of personality types
to implement an innovation from start to fruition. In other words we are not
reinventing the wheel since the path and instructions as how to implement ETDs
is now easier to follow. Further, we will explore some of the pitfalls and possible
solutions to these problems and then discuss advantages for having an ETD on-line
global library, marketing your program for faculty, students, and the university.
Title: SPINNING THEIR WEBS,
PERMEATING SCHOLARLY AND NON-SCHOLARLY SPHERES: OPEN ACCESS AND DISSEMINATION
OF ELECTRONIC THESES AND DISSERTATIONS IN MUSICOLOGY
Authors: Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith
Abstract: What happens to electronic theses and dissertations in musicology after they are uploaded and entered in university databases and union catalogs? Does open access vary because of the scholarly field, the interdisciplinarity, and the format of electronic theses and dissertations? (Formats include documents described as “plain vanilla”; documents containing links or URLs to websites and some multimedia applications, but also present well and can be understood in paper format; and documents that use many multimedia applications and are best understood in electronic format.) The focus of this study is the dissemination and resulting open access of two electronic documents by the same author: “Alban Berg’s Filmic Music: Intentions and Extensions of the Film Music Interlude in the Opera Lulu” (Louisiana State University, 2002) was an electronic doctoral dissertation from its very inception; and “Adorno on Strauss, Mahler, and Berg (Smith College, 1995) was a thesis originally in paper format that was scanned and submitted in 2002 to the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) under “ETD Individuals.” Submission of the dissertation involved the author’s active participation in the creation and uploading of the document whereas submission of the thesis, though it required the author’s active participation in the scanning of the document (differing from the process that institutions themselves take in scanning theses and dissertations as retrospective projects performed by staff or librarians rather than by the authors), did not involve any further participation in its creation. The scanned thesis thus represented the document as it appeared originally in print. Both documents were available in .pdf, requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader. There is a pronounced absence of a hierarchical structure that distinguishes serious scholarly websites that provide reliable, authoritative information on music and fan-based or strictly commercial websites. This absence provides the backdrop for the dissemination of these two electronic documents. Spinning their webs, permeating scholarly and non-scholarly spheres, these documents have been referred to, marketed, and promoted in directories, databases, music websites, academic library catalogues, and digital libraries.
Title: Addressing Faculty Resistance
to Multimedia ETDs: Models for faculty develpment and training in the assessment
of multimedia texts
Authors: Jude Edminster Ph.D. , Kristine L Blair
Abstract:
As a demonstration of training and research skills, the traditional print dissertation
can be seen as a means to certify a potentially productive scholar within a
particular discipline. The print dissertation demonstrates that faculty have
succeeded in guiding students toward this end, and that students have succeeded
in acquiring the skills associated with productive research. Perhaps one of
the most salient of these skills is the ability to represent their work primarily
with words—words that are carefully and skillfully arranged according
to the conventions of their discipline. Thus, representation of dissertation
research as text has become a well-established norm within the community of
academe. Faculty mentors are familiar with print text and with the print dissertation
as a genre, because most were required to write one themselves. They are generally
comfortable in evaluating its effectiveness as a research report/argument. However,
most are not familiar with multimedia ETDs. Their variable, non-linear structure
and non-textual elements require changes in the evaluation process—changes
that faculty at universities who already accept multimedia work from graduate
students have only just begun to explore.
Resistance on the part of faculty is both epistemological and technological. For example, to what extent does a multimedia dissertation change the traditional concept of the dissertation as an original ‘previously unpublished’ work by a single author? Not unlike debates about the value of collaborative vs. single-authored scholarship in tenure and promotion decisions, similar concerns exist surrounding the interactive, intertextual nature of ETDs as digital scholarship. Thus, much work is still needed to convince faculty across disciplines that the gains of interactive multimedia representations of scholarship enhance rather than diminish the project’s quality and status as ‘original’ work. Moreover, a range of research exists on the resistance faculty have to technology, in part because of the continued lack of clarity on the incentive and reward for digital scholarship, despite the attempts of many disciplinary associations to acknowledge the changing impact of technology on academic labor. As a result, faculty may discourage their own students from pursuing ETDs for future publication purposes, despite the potential for their contribution to the scholarly community.
Much of the uncertainty and discomfort of faculty with multimedia ETDs can be addressed with training in the effective use of new writing technologies, including writing with multimedia. Although thesis and dissertation committees may not be the individuals who train students to develop digital scholarship, they nevertheless require training in the assessment of multimedia texts and the way in which the traditional elements of data collection and representation, research and scholarly argument, manifest themselves differently in new media genres and delivery systems. This training is vital to maintaining the formative assessment processes inherent in the relationship between the candidate and the committee. In addition to addressing these concerns, this presentation will also suggest several technology and faculty development models designed jointly for graduate faculty and graduate students, including the need for such professional development within the context of academic units themselves, to better unify disciplinary methodologies and new media options for the design and delivery of digital scholarship. Part of this process, as we shall stress, occurs not just at thesis or dissertation stage, but in coursework, colloquia, and other professional development forums, in addition to more formalized assessment measures such as preliminary exams, dissertation proposal defenses, and the job search portfolio. Ironically, as more and more institutions expect that future faculty will have skills in developing technology-infused curricula and pedagogies, the necessity and value of skills in producing digital scholarship continues to be a source of resistance and misunderstanding, ultimately requiring more technological training and assessment initiatives for both current and future faculty.
Title: ETD Tutorial for Beginners
Presenters: TBA
Abstract:
Is your university considering an ETD initiative or pilot project? Have you
been sent to "scope out" the ETD world but your university doesn't
really even have ETDs on its "radar" ? Have you started an ETD initiative
or pilot project but are experiencing difficulties? The presenters will lead
a tutorial designed to address your questions and concerns regarding the early
stages of an ETD initiative. How do you go about deciding whether this is for
you? What are the pros and cons of ETDs? How to you begin, once you decide to?
How will ETDs benefit your students and your university? Where can you go for
help? These questions and more will be answered in an interactive setting. Bring
your curiosity, your questions, your experiences, your skepticism. You will
leave with a thorough understanding of what ETDs are, why more and more universities
are allowing - even requiring - their students do them, how to begin an ETD
initiative if you do not have one, what issues and problems you will face (and
how to solve or overcome them), and where to go for more information.
Title: Improving the ETD submission
process through automated author self contribution using DSpace
Authors: Bradley M Hemminger , Jackson Fox , Mao Ni
Abstract:
We are developing support for ETDs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill (UNC) as the first step in supporting electronic scholarly publishing in
general. In this paper we discuss the decision making process undertaken at
UNC to evaluate ways to support ETDs and electronic scholarly publishing, and
how we have chosen a path that begins with ETDs and leads to general electronic
scholarly publishing for the university. We believe this is an important developmental
phase that many universities will go through, and we give our analysis of the
choices available, our decisions, and work we have done to enhance the process.
Because we found that existing ETD and scholarly electronic publishing applications did not fully meet our needs, we developed extensions to what we felt was the most promising public domain digital library software application for our needs (DSpace) to provide enhanced support for ETD publishing, and electronic scholarly publishing. We have developed enhancements to DSpace that allow single click submission of ETDs and journal articles based on templates for these types of digital content. Our system automatically records, extracts and exports metadata via XML for digital content items (theses, dissertations, journal articles), so that the author and the digital library do not have to fill out forms to do this. Our method maintains the overall DSpace process and simply eliminates the initial steps by automatically extracting the metadata from the digital content item. We have also modified DSpace to base its metadata and input forms on the collection (for instance ETDs versus journal articles). In our initial evaluations with ETDs we find that authors require only a fraction of the time, and are much more likely to submit material using our enhanced paradigm than if they use the standard DSpace forms. In other preliminary work with bioinformatics and information science faculty at UNC we are finding similar results for submitting journal articles.
We believe that standard, open source applications like DSpace are a solid base on which to build digital libraries, and that their support of OAI provides an excellent mechanism to export our ETDs. We also believe that universities will become significant electronic publishers of scholarly material, and that systems like DSpace which can support initial electronic publishing steps like ETDs as well as supporting the electronic publication needs of the whole university are a good choice. In order for a flexible, general system like DSpace to be effective for specific purposes like ETDs, several important enhancements are suggested for DSpace or similar applications. We demonstrate methods to accomplish these enhancements and show results that indicate that they significantly improve the effectiveness and user experience of the submission process.
Title: ETD in a Nutshell: Development
of the WVU eTD System
Authors: Haritha Garapati
Abstract:
I am graduate student in the Computer Science department at West Virginia University
(WVU) in Morgantown. It is my pleasure to participate in the ETD 2004 Symposium
and I am glad to bring forward our new Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (eTD)
system. The WVU eTD database system development is the topic of my Master’s
project on which I have been working for the past seven months for the WVU Office
of Information Systems.
The new eTD database is built on the Oracle platform. It is a "smart" system because it knows who is logged into the system and each person’s role on each ETD submission. It allows the users to submit a thesis or dissertation and update document information. After submission, e-mails are sent automatically to the Library Administrator, Committee Chair, Committee Members and the author regarding the submission. The Committee Chair can review the document and can either approve or reject the document. The Library Administrator reviews the document and makes an evaluation of the document and its associated paperwork. E-mails are sent automatically to the respective persons regarding the decision. Visitors and the WVU community can enter the system, browse and search based on their interest and can view the document data and download the files for reference.
Some fancy features of the system include multiple file upload/download, and searching for the committee members by entering the last name or first letter which results in a list of all the related persons. Additionally WVU faculty, students and staff will have remote secured access to campus-restricted documents. Another striking feature is the Advanced Search screen that includes search by college, department, degree program, author’s name, title, abstract, committee member etc.
It was a challenging yet enjoyable experience developing the new ETD system with the whole team. The migration procedure, system design, architecture and the front-end layout process was impressive. Everything was done systematically and the goals were reached in a timely fashion. Any suggestions and innovative ideas were appreciated and it encouraged me to come up with new ideas and improve my technical and programming skills.
Title: Accessibility of theses and
dissertation in long term. Swedish project SVEP
Authors: Eva Müller
Abstract:
One of the objectives of the project funded by the Swedish Royal Library’s
department for National Co-ordination and Development (BIBSAM) and called SVEP
(coordination of academic electronic publishing in Sweden) is to ensure the
accessibility of theses and dissertations produced at Swedish universities in
the long term.
The project deals with development and practical implementation of a generalized archiving workflow between a local repository and a national archive, focusing on the variety of publishing platforms and systems currently used by Swedish universities. This workflow is based on usage of URN:NBN as an unique identifier. Some other questions - for example: What is a minimal level of preservation metadata for theses and dissertations - are also explored.
As the start point for the project are solutions developed by DiVA project used. Because of a lack of practical examples of implementations of solutions supporting long term preservation and accessibility within the library community, we believe the project results will be broadly useful.
Title: Building-up a
Co-ordination Agency for online dissertations and post-doctoral theses in Germany
Authors: Thomas Wollschlaeger
Abstract:
During the project "Dissertations Online", the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
supported the development of solutions and assistances for the production, retrieval
and long-term availability of digital dissertations. To keep the outcome of
that project state-of-the-art, to initiate necessary further developments, and
to build up a network of competence, the project "Build-up of a Co-ordination
Agency for Online Dissertations and Post-doctoral Theses" has been set
up to expand the Co-ordination Agency DissOnline. The Co-ordination Agency is
a unique institution to co-ordinate ETD publishing in Germany, and is responsible
for attending the largest collection of ETDs in Europe (>20.000 dissertations
and post-doctoral theses, accessible free and in fulltext).
The project comprises an analysis of the current infrastructure concerning online dissertations at German universities, including a comparison of the different promotion regulations, workflows, online support systems and portal software. The FAQ system is being built up in revised form, and the recommendations for doctoral candidates, libraries and universities will be replenished and enhanced. Legal issues are being dealt with in collateral service contracts.
The first major project part, the ETD publishing infrastructure analysis and a survey among doctoral candidates, has been completed in 2003. The results of the analysis will be presented. Not all universities in Germany have accepted the publication of doctoral theses as ETDs yet, and quite a number of faculties do not support ETD publishing. Additionally, the efforts made by libraries and universities to advertise for ETDs did not reach the majority of doctoral candidates. Therefore, the Co-ordination Agency DissOnline has been designing several leaflets supporting the ETD promotion.
The results of the infrastructure anaylsis and the survey are being considered extensively by the design of the new interactive DissOnline information system. That new information system will be shown and explained. It is completely written in XML with XSL(T) transformation.
The outcome of the project shall be proposals to a uniform, workable procedure DissOnline in Germany that are to be discussed and harmonized with universities, computer centres and libraries.
Title: Project GRACE: A grid based
search tool for the global digital library
Authors: Frank Scholze, Glenn Haya, Jens Vigen, Petra Prazak
Abstract:
The paper will report on the progress of an ongoing EU project called GRACE
- Grid Search and Categorization Engine (http://www.grace-ist.org).
The project participants are CERN, Sheffield Hallam University, Stockholm University,
Stuttgart University, GL 2006 and Telecom Italia. The project started in 2002
and will finish in 2005, resulting in a Grid based search engine that will search
across a variety of content sources including a number of electronic thesis
and dissertation repositories.
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is expanding and is clearly an interesting movement for a community advocating open access to ETD. However, the OAI approach alone may not be sufficiently scalable to achieve a truly global ETD Digital Library. Many universities simply offer their collections to the world via their local web services without being part of any federated system for archiving and even those dissertations that are provided with OAI compliant metadata will not necessarily be picked up by a centralized OAI Service Provider as the collection might not be officially registered as an OAI data provider.
GRACE is an attempt to apply an innovative Grid-based solution that will meet the challenges of searching a global heterogeneous collection of documents. The goal of the project is to build a distributed search and categorization engine that will run on the European Data Grid (EDG) and its successor, the Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe (EGEE). The main difference between GRACE and existing search engines is that GRACE has no centralized index. Instead, it will rely on local indexes or search interfaces that are dispersed across web services around the world. These local sources can use different protocols including http, OAI-PMH and Z39.50. In order to include and index even document collections offering no local search possibilities at all, GRACE will use a native search engine based on Lucene. This decentralized approach, along with the scalable processing power provided by the Grid will result in the following advantages to users:
The list of contents sources that the GRACE engine will search is still being developed, but thesis collections in Germany, Sweden and Switzerland are already included. The list will be expanded to include other sources as soon as the tool is up and running.
This paper will be a description of the search tool as well as an invitation to collaboration.
Title: Learning Modules as Support for
the use of Adobe Acrobat 6.0 in Creating Electronic Thesis and Dissertations
(ETD).
Authors: Cindy Gray, Susan Metros, William Clark, Glen McCandless
Abstract:
Graduate programs around the world are moving towards requiring or recommending
that theses and dissertations must be submitted and archived in electronic format
instead of the traditional print and mircrofilm. Students and faculty need training
to understand how to create an electronic thesis or dissertation (ETD). While
tutorials and help files exist to guide users of Adobe Acrobat, existing training
is not specific to ETDs. Adobe recognizes this problem and has agreed to support
the development of a tutorial solution, based on a request from the NDLTD.
Ohio State is working with Adobe to develop and produce a modular-based training
tutorial to teach students to use Adobe Acrobat to create an ETD. The tutorial
will help students understand how Acrobat can be used to create an ETD and will
teach them how to produce a PDF version of their thesis or dissertation. The
tutorial will include content on how to embed fonts, incorporate navigation
and to add existing multimedia files into ETDs, etc. Because educational materials
must be accessible to people with disabilities, this project will incorporate
the accessibility features within Acrobat.