ETD 2004 - Presentation abstracts

ETD 2004 Presentation Abstracts (forth set)

Title: AUSTRALIAN DIGITAL THESES PROGRAM – EXPANSION, PARTNERSHIP AND REDEVELOPMENT
Authors: Tony Cargnelutti

Abstract:
The continuing evolution of the Australian Digital Theses [ADT] Program, with the aid of Federal Government funding, sees it redeveloping the existing central metadata repositor[ http://adt.caul.edu.au/ ] to increase its coverage and utility to the national and international research community. The repository’s content will expand to include metadata about all Australian higher degree theses, whether in digital form or not. This goal responds to a clearly stated desire of the Australian research community, who report difficulty in finding information about theses. This new project, scheduled for completion within the 2004 calendar year, will also identify and test software solutions to support compliance with the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The ADT partner institutions involved in the redevelopment project will also be seeking to address common solutions for local site management of digital theses as part of the institutional repositories development in general. The redevelopment of the ADT metadata repository is an essential adjunct to similar institutional initiatives by providing efficient search services, metadata support services and open access to the world's research community.

Title:ETD: A Fresh Opportunity to Create Value and Shape the Future of Ethiopian Universities
Authors: Yared Mammo

Abstract:
Albert Einstein recognized that searching for solutions to new problems required breaking free from old thought patterns (Mackall, 1998).

Indeed, creative thinking has a great role in addressing the age drawn problems of the least developed countries, like Ethiopian, Universities. No doubt, as a typical out come of creative thinking, ETD will have ample solutions for the age – old academic and scholarly problems of Ethiopian Universities.

Of course, Ethiopian Universities are some how far from the ETD revolution. Actually, one can mention a handful reasons for not utilizing the fruits of ETD. Equally, they can tell you how and what to do to exploit this fresh opportunity to create value for the University and shape the future of its scholarly communities

Across the world, University Libraries are widely known as the heart of the parent institution. They are the pillars for the overall academic achievement of the parent university in particular, and for the sustainable development of a nation, in general. In order to achieve these noble objectives, Ethiopian Universities besides conventional ways of doing things, they should also put ETD as a tool to create value and shape the future of their Universities and Communities.

Thus, the paper will elaborate, from different perspectives, the role of ETD in creating value and shaping the future of Ethiopia Universities and their scholars. In line with this, it will also outline its actual and potential contribution to the Universities and its Communities. Equally, the paper will glimpse at the factors that hindered us not to benefit maximally from the ETD. Finally, it suggests the ways of realizing optimal benefit out of the ETD.

Title: From DTD generation to XML conversion: Structured ETDs at the Document and Publication Server of the Humboldt University
Authors: Uwe Müller

Abstract:
Since 1997 PhD students at Humboldt University Berlin can fulfil their publishing duty concerning their dissertations by using a digital publication. While we were one of the first universities having extended the bunch of accepted publishing possibilities to this method nowadays institutional document and publication servers are regarded as a standard service provided by almost every German university. In contrast to the vast majority of domestic university libraries Humboldt's electronic publishing group has pursued a structured document approach from the very beginning of its activities in this area. The originally developed DiML (Dissertation Markup Language) derived and adapted from an SGML-DTD evolved at Virginia Tech for Electronic Theses and Dissertations has now been transformed to an XML-DTD (xDiML).

In this context a DTD generation system has been developed allowing for the compilation of individually assembled DTDs. For this purpose the elements of the DTD have been grouped into modular units. These modules which are XML files themselves are stored in the DTDBase. Using the DTDSys – a transformation system on the basis of XSLT and Java – the modules can be combined to an individual DTD – e.g. the xDiML DTD used for Theses and Dissertations. Due to its modularity the system can easily be used to supply new publication series with appropriate DTDs, which can contain special elements and which are as slim as possible and thus more easily applicable than a universal "Mega"DTD. The DTDSys also facilitates the integration of externally managed (standard) DTDs such as SVG, SMIL, MathML, or MusicML and thereby allows the generation of DTDs with multimedia extensions. The use of a controlled and centrally managed set of modules provides the advantages of shared semantics beyond the borderline of different DTDs – a feature which is used e.g. for qualified fulltext retrieval.

The XML based publishing approach is currently applied for dissertations and master theses, university serial publications, as well as a few electronic journals and conference proceedings. Different approaches have been developed for the conversion process from text processing systems to XML. They were adapted for the various requirements of the particular author groups or editors. The developed methods include styles and add-ons for OpenOffice/StarOffice, FrameMaker and MS Office. They especially exploit the XML support most software vendors of office systems have newly integrated as a genuine standard interface into their products. The generated XML files form the source for different presentation formats, the basis for longterm preservation activities, and a prerequisite for value added retrieval techniques.

The paper will reveal both, the DTD generation system and the XML conversion process.

Title: Deployment of a digital theses environment: Enabling versus imposing workflow
Authors: Lourdes Fernández Ramírez , Alfredo Sánchez PhD. , Alberto García García

Abstract:
"Tales" is a collaborative environment designed to support all the stages of the life cycle of the theses collection maintained by the Universidad de las Americas, Puebla, Mexico (UDLA). This cycle spans from entering documents into the collection to reviewing, annotating, publishing, navigating and searching. Tales was conceived as a technology-enabled workflow among participants in the process of producing and publishing digital theses: authors, thesis directors, academic department administrators and library staff.

Our initial goal was to design a specially crafted tool in which the participants could be identified and act according to their particular roles and functions. Nowadays, 10 months after making digital thesis a requirement for the 26 departments of the university, the participation level has varied from department to department even though it is a requirement for all. Personnel from the library have offered courses for the participants with excellent results in promoting the use of the available collaborative environment from the participants' offices, computer rooms or homes. Unfortunately, feedback mechanisms have been implemented only though electronic mail. A more formal and complete feedback mechanism is one of the priorities to be implemented in the project.

We describe our work aimed at identifying the factors that influence participants' differing levels of participation and how the workflow facilitates or creates barriers to get the work done. Our initial results show that the acceptance and ultimately the success of a digital theses environment such as Tales depend on factors such as the quality and intuitiveness of the user interface, the perceived responsiveness of the systems, the completeness of its functionality and the engagement level of all the involved participants.

Title: There is a lot more to ETDs
Authors: Ana M B Pavani

Abstract:
In general, ETDs are regarded as sources of information that are very important to graduate students, faculty and researchers. They contain state-of-the-art results and bibliographic reviews, besides being analyzed and approved by committees. Having them online is an important support to research and education.

But there is a lot more to ETDs. They are tools that help change old habits, they introduce topics to discussion that (in some environments) had never been addressed and they can be used to provide information concerning the administration and the demographics of graduate programs.

Let’s examine old habits. One is the way T&Ds are presented; they have had the format of printed books. ETDs have brought up the discussion of multimedia, interaction and simulation as basic parts of T&Ds. In the international scenario, West Virginia University has been very active in discussing and promoting new formats. Another old habit is the workflow from the writing to the reading of T&Ds. The introduction of online digital texts brings to focus the way T&Ds are written and how students can be more active in the process of creation, identification and submission of their works – they can learn how to edit electronic documents.

Authors rights is a topic that in many institutions had not been discussed before ETDs were introduced. The publication on the Internet, due to an ETD project, has brought this discussion to various levels in the universities. The awareness of the rights of authors and the legislation that protects them have become well known in the universities. For this reason, other areas where authors rights are important are benefitting from ETDs. Preservation of digital documents has become an important subject specially because there is a decision to be made about not having paper versions. But digital preservation is not restricted to ETDs and the results apply to other digital contents.

An ETD project provides tools to graduate programs administrators. Interesting numbers to observe are the accesses of ETDs by program or area, the ones that are most read or downloaded. Linking digital libraries of ETDs to other repositories of research and academic information helps map intellectual production.

At the same time, ETDs allow solutions that combine the 3 areas. For example, many administrative information on graduate programs is available on administrative systems of the universities but is not accessed by many users. When an ETD project is ready, the numbers of T&Ds (per year, per program, per supervisor), time-series in the last years, T&Ds funded by agencies and or companies, etc can be found on the Internet. This makes graduate programs more visible.

This paper addresses these topics to show how beneficial an ETD project can be for other groups besides graduate students, faculty and researchers.

Title: SOME PRACTICAL POINTS ON ORGANIZING ETD CONSORTIA
Authors: Silvia B Southwick , Ana M B Pavani

Abstract:
All over the world, there are consortia of ETD digital libraries. Some are national, like the Australian Digital Theses Program (http://adt.caul.edu.au/), while others are regional, like the Tesis Doctorals de Catalunya (http://www.tdcat.cbuc.es/).

Organizing a consortium is a challenge since it involves many institutions with different cultures and activities related to the implementation and the operation of the central services.

The implementation of a consortium requires the following organizing actions:

Developing a model for cooperation and for responsibilities of all parties involved in order to make clear who the participants are and how they are expected to cooperate, from metadata sharing to running servers 24/7;
Developing relationships with funding agencies, national libraries and commercial initiatives. Support from other institutions helps to strengthen the consortium;
Adopting a metadata element set in other to create a union catalog that addresses the needs of participating institutions and of other institutions, allowing the consortium to cooperate in an international scale;
Establishing a training program for partners so that participating institutions have equivalent levels of knowledge and can fully cooperate since these differences in knowledge exist even within a single country;
Developing software solutions that can be used by participating institutions that do not have the resources to develop their own systems. This will help to include institutions that do not have digital libraries and also add economy of scale;
Defining the institution to be responsible for managing the project and establishing service agreements with other participating institutions. This topic addresses the maintenance of union catalog, metadata harvesting, support to local institutions, upgrading of software solution, etc;
Locating funding sources for the creation and the maintenance of the consortium.

The solutions to some of the problems are different from one country to another due to not only to cultural differences but also to governmental structures of each nation. Topics to be considered are the same.

This paper addresses the topics listed above, some solutions that have been implemented and some of the problems that may occur during the organization of a consortium.

Title: Using Acrobat 6.0 to Create High-Quality ETDs at Caltech
Authors: Betsy Coles, George Porter

Abstract:

The Caltech Library has chosen PDF as the archival format for ETDs, because of the near-ubiquity of free reader software and the fact that PDF is an openly documented specification. PDF also leaves control of document appearance in the hands of the author, and allows integrated audio and video presentation. Caltech has a campus site license for Adobe Acrobat 6.0, which is the most sophisticated tool for creating high-quality PDF.

Caltech graduate students use a number of authoring tools to create their ETDs, including Microsoft Word on PC and Macintosh; LaTeX on multiple platforms using varied editing environments; OpenOffice on both PC and Linux; and FrameMaker on PC or Mac. This means that the paths from source document to final PDF format are many and varied—one process does not fit all! The Library provides support to students in producing high-quality PDF, regardless of the authoring platform the student has chosen. Classes are offered every quarter which demonstrate the use of Acrobat 6.0 to accomplish this goal. This poster session is intended to share the methods and materials we have developed to guide students in:

Document workflow from the student’s chosen authoring environment to PDF
Tips, tricks, and caveats appropriate to each authoring environment: templates; embedding fonts; graphics resolutions; linked materials
How (and why) to produce high-quality PDF, using the PDF Settings in Acrobat Distiller
How to use Acrobat to stitch together a large document from multiple parts (chapters), which may have been authored in a variety of editing environments and/or platforms
How to enhance PDFs with bookmarks, links and media using Acrobat

Title: TRAINING MANAGERS FOR ETD PROJECTS
Authors: Ana M B Pavani, Bruno R Hedler, Tiago T Peres, Viviane M Costa, Marcela S Ferreira, Ane C Cardão, Carolina A Carvalho, Renata M J Ferreira

Abstract:
UNESCO’s Regional Office for Science and Technology in Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Montevideo, Uruguay, has devoted efforts and financial resources to support ETDs in the region. Some of its actions have focused in training teams for ETD projects.

From August 2000 to January 2004, 8 courses have been taught in different countries in Latin America. More than 200 professionals from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela attended the courses. They were ICT professionals, librarians, graduate programs administrators and graduate and undergraduate students. The same course was taught 6 additional times in Latin America with different sponsors.

In order to be able to reach more professionals and to make training less expensive, since travelling costs are a limiting factor both for instructors and for students, an online version was developed. This version had the support of both UNESCO’s Regional Office and IBICT – Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia, an institution of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Brazil. It was developed by LAMBDA – Laboratório de Automação de Museus, Bibliotecas Digitais e Arquivos of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The syllabus, the contents and the technological implementation were done by the laboratory team; two versions were implemented – one in Portuguese and the other in Spanish.

The course reflects the experience of 14 traditional sessions but was developed with greater depth and with a wider scope since it is equivalent to a 40-hour traditional face-to-face version. When it was taught in a traditional way it was between 16 and 20 hours long.

The topics cover from basic knowledge in ICT and digital information to managerial aspects of an ETD project. It addresses standards, metadata sets, authors rights, national and iinternational consortia, open archives and the development of projects in universities. The fnal activity is writing the outline of a pre-project.

The topics of the course are:

* Introduction – Importance and motivation * ICT and digital information * Digital collections and items * Standards for systems based on ICT * Metadata * The Brazilian National Project – Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD) * The international network – Network Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations * Specific Metadata for ETDs * Open archives * Open archives, BDTD and NDLTD * The international context * ETD’s digital library processes * Intellectual Property * Basic definition of an ETD project – institutional commitment * Digital library of theses and dissertations – initial phase * Basic definitions of an ETD project – new theses and dissertations * Basic definitions of an ETD project – old theses and dissertations – retrospective capture of theses and dissertations in paper and in digital formats * How to start? presentation of a pre-project outline * Links and references

The course was developed using Macromedia Director. It has extensive interaction through online self-assessment exercises, refers to sites for students to read and learn on complementary references, and discusses financial and managerial aspects of a project, as well as the roles of different teams in the universities.

Title: Caltech ETD Collection Analysis: Who Accesses What and Why?
Authors: Ed Sponsler , George Porter , Betsy Coles

Abstract:
The Caltech Library’s ETD collection contains nearly 1,000 theses and dissertations. About 270 of these are “current” theses submitted by students graduating in 2001 through 2004, with the majority being from the class of 2003, for whom submission of an ETD was required. The balance is older theses which have been scanned and converted to PDF as part of an ongoing retrospective conversion project.

The Library has undertaken a project to analyze the use of its ETD collection, with the aim of answering the following questions:

-- What documents are most heavily used? Least heavily used?? -- How does use of the older “reconned” theses compare with newer theses? Is scanning older theses worth the effort? -- What makes “reconned” theses interesting: the subject matter? famous authors? What makes current theses interesting? -- How do users get to the theses—via Google, OAI, the ETD Union catalog, others? -- How does known item retrieval (such as author browsing) compare with searching in terms of discovery? -- Where is the demand coming from—Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, India, China, Korea, Japan? -- Is demand hampered by known bandwidth problems, as in Africa and the former Soviet Republics?

This paper reports on the tools and methods developed to perform this analysis, as well as the conclusions reached.

Title: St. Mary of Egypt in BL MS Cotton Otho B. x: An HTML ETD
Authors: Linda Cantara

Abstract:

At the University of Kentucky, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is the required ETD format. Although Adobe promotes PDF as a standard it is, in fact, a proprietary format that must be created and viewed using Adobe software. A committee of government, industry, and academic representatives is currently attempting to develop an International Standards Organization (ISO) specification for a subset of PDF (PDF/A) that will serve as an archival digital preservation format. In the meantime, the only way to ensure long-term preservation of a PDF document is to print it on archival paper.

In addition to the required PDF format, UK also accepts an additional alternative version in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In 2001, as one of the first UK graduate students to submit an ETD, I elected to write my thesis in HTML, then converted that version to PDF to meet the format requirement. HTML was designed specifically for displaying an electronic document that includes digital images and hyperlinks from one location in the document to another. In contrast to PDF, no special software other than a plain text editor is required to create an HTML document, no special software other than a Web browser is required to view an HTML document, and even if an HTML document "breaks" the text can still be read.

In 2003, I received the Council of Southern Graduate Schools (CSGS) Master Thesis Award for the Humanities and Arts Division. My electronic poster will be a computer-based demonstration of my award-winning ETD. In the narrative accompanying my demonstration I will explain why I decided to submit an HTML ETD, will illustrate the differences between the HTML and PDF versions, and will discuss why, if I were creating an ETD today, I would write it in eXtensible Markup Language (XML).