DigitalKoans

The Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 2 is now available from Digital Scholarship.

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, conference papers, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see Digital Scholarship Publications Overview.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2007 Annual Edition is now available from Digital Scholarship.

Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing. Each annual edition is based on the last HTML version published during the edition's year.

The SEPB 2007 Annual Edition is based on Version 70 (12/18/2007). The printed bibliography is over 260 pages long. The PDF file is over 1 MB.

In addition to updated URLs, hundreds of additional URLs have been added to the SEPB 2007 Annual Edition. (The additional URLs will be added to Version 72 of the SEPB HTML edition.)

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see Digital Scholarship Publications Overview.

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "Adventures in Open Data," "Architectures for Collaboration: Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries," "The Australian METS Profile—A Journey about Metadata," "The Fifth Blackbird: Some Thoughts on Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation," "Journals at bepress: New Twists on an Old Model," "Library Access to Scholarship: Harvard & Institutional Repositories," "OPAC Integration in the Era of Mass Digitization: The MBooks Experience," "The Open Access Mandate at Harvard," and "Taking the Plunge: Open Access at the Canadian Journal of Sociology."

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive file has been updated to include version 71. The archive ZIP file is about 44 MB in size.

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "The ARROW Project: A Consortial Institutional Repository Solution, Combining Open Source and Proprietary Software"; "Collecting Metadata from Institutional Repositories"; Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide; "ePrints@IISc: India's First and Fastest Growing Institutional Repository"; "Institutional Repositories and E-Journal Archiving: What Are We Learning?"; "The Open Access Mandate at Harvard"; A Review and Analysis of Academic Publishing Agreements and Open Access Policies; "SWORD: Simple Web-Service Offering Repository Deposit"; "Talk about Talking about New Models of Scholarly Communication"; and "Version Identification: A Growing Problem."

Version 71 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,250 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview."

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "Carrots and Sticks: Some Ideas on How to Create a Successful Institutional Repository"; A DRIVER's Guide to European Repositories; The European Repository Landscape: Inventory Study into Present Type and Level of OAI Compliant Digital Repository Activities in the EU; "India, Open Access, the Law of Karma and the Golden Rule"; Investigative Study of Standards for Digital Repositories and Related Services; "The Mandates of January"; "The Preservation of Digital Materials"; "Open Access and Quality"; "Open Access to Electronic Theses and Dissertations"; "Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation"; "PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services"; "SPARC: Creating Innovative Models and Environments for Scholarly Research and Communication"; and "Usage Impact Factor: The Effects of Sample Characteristics on Usage-Based Impact Metrics."

Scholarly bibliographies are not destined for the bestseller list. This is especially true of bibliographies that deal with fairly specialized topics vs. those that deal with topics of more general interest. Selling more than a few hundred copies of a specialized bibliography is a major achievement.

Does open access to digital bibliographies change the picture? Two digital books, one of which is also in print form, illustrate the potential of this new publishing strategy.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography has been freely available since 1996. What has use been like? Below is a table that shows file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand (a "page," such as an HTML page or a PDF file, contains content; page requests are a subset of file requests).

From 2006 onward there is only partial use data, since all or part of the University of Houston Libraries' use data for this period is unavailable to me. (DLIST and E-LIS use is not included for any year.)

In my experience, Web log statistics provide a general indicator of the magnitude of use, but not an absolutely precise one. There are also hermetic disputes about whether spider activity should be included, as it is above.

There are four things to note about SEPB: (1) it was born digital and has live links; (2) in July 2004, it was put under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License that permits any kind of noncommercial use or reuse; (3) it has been updated 70 times, and these updates have been advertised; and (4) it includes a Weblog and a resource directory. It also has a prehistory: the freely available article that it was based on had 26 versions, so one could argue that the bibliography has 96 versions.

These characteristics make SEPB represent an extension and evolution of the traditional bibliography model, but not a perfect example of it.

For more information on the evolution of SEPB, see the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" and "A Look Back at Eighteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher."

The second bibliography, the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, is closer to the traditional model because it has not been updated and it is based on a printed book. There are two digital versions: a PDF file and a XHTML site, neither of which has live links. All print and digital versions are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. The OAB was advertised on the Internet and elsewhere.

Below is a table that shows OAB file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand. It does not include any use of the digital book at the publisher's Website (Association of Research Libraries) nor at DLIST and E-LIS.

Does open access make a difference? The history of these two open access digital books suggests that it can significantly increase use. As the potentials of digital publication are more fully exploited (e.g., linking and updating), use may be driven even higher. However, these examples tell us nothing about the commercial potential of open access books, since my data are for "no-profit" use only and do not include ARL sales data for the print book (I do not receive royalties and do not have access to this data).

In 2007, there were over 849,000 hits (a "hit" is any Web file retrieved) and 779,000 page views (a "page," such as an HTML page or a PDF file, contains content) for the Digital Scholarship Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography archive (use statistics for the 1996-2006 University of Houston Libraries SEPB archive are unknown). WebLog Expert was used for this analysis; the below rankings are by number of visitors.

There were over 195,000 visitors from 154 countries. The top 20 countries were: United States, Sweden, Canada, United Kingdom, France, China, Germany, India, Japan, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Korea, Italy, Switzerland, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, and Romania.

The top ten academic institutions were: University of Illinois; Texas A&M University; Stanford University; Seton Hall University; Norwegian University of Science and Technology; University of British Columbia; University of California, Office of the President; Cornell University; Tohoku University; and University of Washington.

In 2007, there were over 78,000 hits and 72,000 page views for the Digital Scholarship Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals archive (use statistics for the ARL OAB archive are unknown).

There were over 39,000 visitors from 155 countries. The top 20 countries were: United States, China, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Bulgaria, France, Spain, Sweden, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Italy, Korea, Poland, Turkey, and Romania.

The top ten academic institutions were: Universitaet Hamburg; Loughborough University; University of Illinois; Universitat Pompeu Fabr; Stanford University; Leeds University; Michigan State University; Texas A&M University; University at Albany, State University of New York; and University of Portsmouth.