Katherine Skinner,
Executive Director
Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative

Matt Schultz
Program Manager
Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative

Gail McMillan
Director, Digital Library and Archives
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Providing the ETDs of Today for the Researchers of Tomorrow (Halbert, Skinner, Schultz)

This briefing will highlight and discuss the early findings from an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project hosted by the University of North Texas that is researching and documenting a range of life cycle curation and preservation practices for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). An accompanying workshop is planned for summer 2013 in conjunction with United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USetdA) 2013 conference. This project briefing will solicit advice on proper delivery formats. The briefing will also discuss developments toward a series of micro services that will assist ETD programs with enhancing the curation of their ETDs; implementation use cases will be discussed. Partners on this project include Educopia Institute, the Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations, and the university libraries of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Pennsylvania State University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Rice University, and the University of Arizona.

http://metaarchive.org/imls

Do Open Access ETDs Effect Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences? Findings from the 2012 Survey of Academic Journal Editors (McMillan)

Although open public access to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) has been widely implemented in higher education, some faculty advisors and graduate student authors are still concerned that unfiltered access to their ETDs could diminish future publishing opportunities. This presentation will discuss a survey of academic journal editors about their attitudes towards ETDs that was conducted under the auspices of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. At the fall 2011 Coalition for Networked Information meeting, results of a survey of social science and humanities editors and university press directors were reported. This presentation will share the latest survey findings regarding the policies of science journals in light of open access ETDs. It will also compare the results from the social science and humanities survey and the science survey as well as the 2012 and 1999 surveys of science editors’ attitudes towards ETDs.

Survey authors: Gail McMillan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Marisa L. Ramirez, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Joan Dalton, University of Windsor; Ann Hanlon, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Heather Smith, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Chelsea Kern, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

This fall, for the first time in its 71 year history, the ProQuest / UMI Dissertation Publishing service did not charge authors or universities a publishing fee for e-submissions of master’s theses or PhD dissertations. This presentation offers a case study of ProQuest’s leveraging of cutting edge digital publishing technologies in order to lower costs and pass on those savings to customers. The presentation will also provide results from a recent survey conducted by ProQuest about perceptions of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), including the need to clarify issues related to copyright registration and dissertations. This program continues CNI’s active participation in the ETD movement, which has been ongoing since the early 1990s.

Jody Combs
Director of the Digital Library
Vanderbilt University

John Burger
Executive Director
Association of Southeastern Research Libraries

Thomas Stuart Robertson
Assistant Director and Technical Manager, LOCKSS Program
Stanford University

The ASERL LOCKSS-ETD Initiative is a joint project between the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Program at Stanford University and the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL). Participating in the project are the following ASERL Libraries: Florida State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Kentucky, University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. This group is utilizing the latest version of LOCKSS (1.10.5) to harvest electronic theses and dissertations from each institution using the OAI-PMH. The OAI-PMH is used to create a LOCKSS archival unit for collections such as ETDs which are continually updated. The LOCKSS caches at each institution allow for multiple copies of ETDs in geographically dispersed locations thus offering an additional layer of preservation for each ETD collection as well as a cooperative open-source model for organizations that support E-Scholarship publishing initiatives.

Handout (PDF)

PowerPoint Presentations

Joan K. Lippincott
Associate Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

Eva Muller
Director, Electronic Publishing Centre
Uppsala University

Susan Copeland
Senior Librarian
Robert Gordon University

Universities are increasingly understanding the value of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) as institutional assets and they are working to encourage submission of ETDs and development of access and storage mechanisms that encourage their broad availability. In this session, four board members of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) initiative, will provide an update on trends and projects related to ETDs. These will include incorporating ETDs into institutional repositories, availability of new ETD tutorials, a consortial project in the UK that is developing a national infrastructure for e-theses, and national theses portals in the Scandinavian countries.

http://www.ndltd.org
http://uppsok.libris.kb.se/sru/uppsok
http://www.diva-portal.org/index.xsql?lang=en

PowerPoint Presentations:
The Global Reach of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Fox)
Electronic Theses: Developments in the UK (Copeland)
Current state of activities and trends in the ETD’s development in Scandinavia (Muller)

Timothy Brace
Senior Systems Analyst
University of Texas at Austin

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, in conjunction with the Berkeley Electronic Press, has developed a Web-based application for the submission, review and approval of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The application is expected to improve and speed the dissertation and thesis publishing process for graduate students, faculty, and graduate schools.

The new system allows a graduate student to upload his/her approved document into the publishing system, where it is automatically reformatted into Adobe PDF and sent directly to the graduate school. The document is then reviewed for compliance with graduate school policy and format. The system allows the graduate school to track the document throughout the entire process. Using an administrative tool, the graduate school reviewer can accept the document or request revisions. The author is automatically notified by e-mail of the actions taken. Once the thesis or dissertation is accepted, the document and all relevant metadata are delivered to UMI Dissertations Publishing for expedited processing, cataloguing, and posting. The university library also automatically receives a copy of the document. This briefing will describe the project and report on progress to date.

http://dissertations.umi.com/

This session will provide a review of the work and recommendations of the Arizona State University Task Force on Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Topics to be addressed include: student submission and workflow processes and digital preservation for text and multimedia. Discussion will focus on costs, methods, and institutional commitment to digital preservation.

PowerPoint Presentation:
Archival Considerations for ETD’s

This session presents the most recent developments at UMI Dissertation Publishing, including access, reformatting, usage and digital preservation.