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.

MFA students at the University of Iowa have been upset about a requirement that would make their theses available as open access documents either immediately or in two years (if they ask for an extension). A number of student blog postings have protested this requirement. Part of the problem is that MFA theses can be creative works (or other types of works, such as nonfiction works) that may have commercial potential. Peter Suber has analyzed the situation in his "Controversy over OA for Fine Arts Theses and Dissertations" posting.

The Interim Provost, Lola Lopes, has now issued a statement about the conflict.

Here's an excerpt from that statement:

For some time now our library, like most major academic research libraries, has been exploring ways to make its collections more accessible by digitizing some materials. As part of that process, there has been discussion about the possibility of making graduate student dissertations and theses available in electronic format. But any such process must be preceded by developing policies and procedures that allow authors to decide whether and when to allow distribution.

On Monday, March 17, I will begin pulling together a working group with representatives from the Graduate College, University Libraries, our several writing programs, and all other constituencies who wish to be part of the process. Under the leadership of Carl Seashore in 1922, Iowa became the first university in the United States to award MFA degrees based on creative projects. Although this has been a rocky start, I like to think that Iowa will again lead the way by developing policies and procedures that safeguard intellectual property rights while preserving materials for the use of scholars in generations to come.

Read more about it at "Iowa's 'Open Access' Policy Is Nothing but a Trojan Horse"; "Students, UI Grapple over Online Publishing"; "Thesis Policy Sparks Uproar"; "U. of Iowa Writing Students Revolt Against a Plan They Say Would Give Away Their Work on the Web"; and "Writing Students Want UI Not to Give Away Their Work."

The University of Auckland now gives students submitting an electronic theses or dissertation the option of putting it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand License.

Read more about it "University of Auckland Embeds CC Licensing" and "Guidelines for Formatting a Digital Thesis."

Peter Murray-Rust's presentation at Caltech on "The Power of the Scientific eThesis" is now available. (You may be asked to install an ActiveX control by MediaSite; you can run the presentation without it.)

Source: Smart, Laura J. "Peter Murray-Rust at Caltech." Repositories for the Rest of Us, 7 September 2007.

The SURFfoundation has released A Portal for Doctoral E-Theses in Europe: Lessons Learned from a Demonstrator Project by M. P. J. P. Vanderfeesten. The portal project was funded by JISC, the National Library of Sweden, and the SURFfoundation. The SURFfoundation ran the project.

Here’s an excerpt from the "Management Summary":

For the first time various repositories with doctoral e-theses have been harvested on an international scale. This report describes a small pilot project which tested the interoperability of repositories for e-theses and has set up a freely accessible European portal with over 10,000 doctoral e-theses.

Five repositories from five different countries in Europe were involved: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was the common protocol used to test the interoperability. Based upon earlier experiences and developed tools (harvester, search engine) of the national DAREnet service in the Netherlands, SURFfoundation could establish a prototype for this European e-theses Demonstrator relatively fast and simple.

Nevertheless, some critical issues and problems occurred. They can be categorised into the following topics:

a) Generic issues related to repositories: the language used in the metadata fields differs per repository. . . . Furthermore, the quality of the data presented differs.. . . A further issue is the semantic and syntactic differences in metadata between repositories, which means that the format and content of the information exchange requests are not unambiguously defined. . . .

b) E-theses specific issues: to be able to harvest doctoral theses, the service provider needs to be able to filter on this document type. Up to now there is no commonly agreed format, which makes semantic interoperability possible [specific Dublin core recommendations omitted]. . . .

c) Issues related to data providers and service providers: besides the use of the OAI-protocol for metadata harvesting and the use of Dublin Core it is recommended for data providers to further standardise on the semantic interoperability by using the DRIVER guidelines with an addition of the e-Theses specific recommendations described above. To be able to offer more than basic services for e-Theses, one has to change the metadata format from simple Dublin Core to a richer and e-Theses specific one. . . . We needed to fix, normalise and crosswalk the differences between every repository to get a standard syntactic and semantic metadata structure. . . . The scaling up is a big issue. To stimulate the broad take up of various services, data providers have to work on implementing standards that create interoperability on syntactic and semantic levels.

d) Cultural and educational differences: In every country the educational processes are different. . . . Not only the graduation and publication process differs, but also the duration of the research process. Therefore the quality of the results in a cross-European search of doctoral theses may vary enormously.

(Thanks to Open Access News.)

The Council of Australian University Librarians has released Australasian Digital Theses Program: Membership Survey 2006.

Here’s an excerpt from the "Key Findings" section:

1. The average percentage of records for digital theses added to ADT is 95% when digital submission is mandatory and 17% when it is not mandatory. . . .

2. 59% of respondents will have mandatory digital submission in place in 2007.

3. With this level of mandatory submission it is predicted that 60% of all theses produced in Australia and New Zealand in 2007 will have a digital copy recorded in ADT. . . .

5. The overwhelming majority of respondents offer a mediated submission service, either only having a mediated service or offering both mediated and self-submission services. When mediated and self-submission are both available, the percentage self-submitted is polarised with some achieving over a 75% self-submission rate.

6. Over half the respondents have a repository already and most are using it to manage digital theses.

7. 87% will have a repository by the end of this year, and the rest are in the initial planning stage.

Presentations from Friday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

• Doctoral e-Theses; Experiences in Harvesting on a National and European Level (PowerPoint): "In the presentation we will show some lessons learned and the first results of the Demonstrator, an interoperable portal of European doctoral e-theses in five countries: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK."
• Exploring Overlay Journals: The RIOJA project (PowerPoint): "This presentation introduces the RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) project, on which a group of cosmology researchers from the UK is working with UCL Library Services and Cornell University. The project is creating a tool to support the overlay of journals onto repositories, and will demonstrate a cosmology journal overlaid on top of arXiv."
• Dissemination or Publication? Some Consequences from Smudging the Boundaries between Research Data and Research Papers (PDF): "Project StORe’s repository middleware will enable researchers to move seamlessly between the research data environment and its outputs, passing directly from an electronic article to the data from which it was developed, or linking instantly to all the publications that have resulted from a particular research dataset."
• Open Archives, The Expectations of the Scientific Communities (RealVideo): "This analysis led the French CNRS to start the Hal project, a pluridisciplinary open archive strongly inspired by ArXiv, and directly connected to it. Hal actually automatically transfers data and documents to ArXiv for the relevant disciplins; similarly, it is connected to Pum Med and Pub Med Central for life sciences. Hal is customizable so that institutions can build their own portal within Hal, which then plays the role of an institutional archive (examples are INRIA, INSERM, ENS Lyon, and others)."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

A UK-wide ETD project called EThOSnet has been funded for a two-year period by JISC and CURL (Consortium of Research Libraries). When the project concludes, the British Library will establish the EThOS service based on the work done by EThOSnet.

An excerpt from the press release is below:

The project builds on earlier exploratory work, also funded by JISC and CURL, which between 2004 and 2006 developed a prototype for the service. Independent evaluation has since given the prototype strong backing and suggested further developments, while a recent consultation resulted in expressions of interest from over 70 HE institutions to participate in the emerging e-theses service.

EThOSnet builds on these firm foundations and through collaboration with the British Library and the HE community will transform access to theses in the UK by providing the full text of theses through a single point of entry. In addition, in tandem with the emerging network of institutional repositories in the UK, it promises to become a central element of the national infrastructure for research.

The University of Notre Dame Libraries have issued a report about their year-long institutional repository pilot project. There is an abbreviated HTML version and a complete PDF version.

From the Executive Summary:

Here is the briefest of summaries regarding what we did, what we learned, and where we think future directions should go:

1. What we did—In a nutshell we established relationships with a number of content groups across campus: the Kellogg Institute, the Institute for Latino Studies, Art History, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Life Science, the Nanovic Institute, the Kaneb Center, the School of Architecture, FTT (Film, Television, and Theater), the Gigot Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Graduate School, the University Intellectual Property Committee, the Provost’s Office, and General Counsel. Next, we collected content from many of these groups, "cataloged" it, and saved it into three different computer systems: DigiTool, ETD-db, and DSpace. Finally, we aggregated this content into a centralized cache to provide enhanced browsing, searching, and syndication services against the content.
2. What we learned—We essentially learned four things: 1) metadata matters, 2) preservation now, not later, 3) the IDR requires dedicated people with specific skills, 4) copyright raises the largest number of questions regarding the fulfillment of the goals of the IDR.
3. Where we are leaning in regards to recommendations—The recommendations take the form of a "Chinese menu" of options, and the options are be grouped into "meals." We recommend the IDR continue and include: 1) continuing to do the Electronic Theses & Dissertations, 2) writing and implementing metadata and preservation policies and procedures, 3) taking the Excellent Undergraduate Research to the next level, and 4) continuing to implement DigiTool. There are quite a number of other options, but they may be deemed too expensive to implement.