Building an Open-Source Archive for Born-Digital Dissertations

This proposal for a Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant would support an interdisciplinary workshop aimed at identifying the issues, opportunities and requirements for developing an open-source system into which born-digital dissertations (e.g., interactive webtexts, software, games, etc.) can be deposited and maintained, and through which they can be accessed and cross-referenced. The workshop will build upon the framework set up by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLDT) and the United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USETDA), which support the creation and dissemination of digital dissertations, but, despite best efforts, do not currently offer a comprehensive, central repository or index of born-digital dissertations such as exists for print (e.g., Proquest). One of the primary goals for this workshop will be to develop a plan for the development of such a tool as well as the identification of a project advisory board

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETD) Formatting & Copyright workshop

This is the recording of the December 3, 2015 Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Formatting & Copyright workshop. See the links used in the presentation, as well as information updated since the presentation, in the Additional Resources file in this record. Note: The Copyright section of the ETD Release Form referred to in the latter part of the presentation has since changed to include a third choice: "Copyrighted material used with owner’s permission (provide documentation of permissions)."This workshop is for graduate students at any stage of the thesis or dissertation process. If you're just starting out, you can build your own template for future use. If you’re nearing the end, come join us for some quick tips that will save you some time and trouble as you move forward. Here are the ETD Formatting topics covered: 1. General information about the thesis/dissertation process, 2. Content order, 3. Title and acceptance pages, 4. Page numbering, 5. Building an automatic table of contents using heading styles, 6. Generating a table of contents, 7. Captioning figures, equations, tables and more, 8. Embedding fonts, and 9. Converting to PDF. The workshop also covers the basics of copyright for grad students as scholars and teachers, including copyright considerations for theses and dissertations, and resources in the KU Libraries that can help. Here are the Copyright topics covered: 1. General information about copyrights in the U.S., 2. Copyrights and scholarly publications, including theses and dissertations, 3. Fair Use and scholarly work, 4. The Copyright Decision Tree – A tool developed at KU to help users decide whether they are using copyrighted materials in compliance with U.S. copyright law and/or fair use, 5. Copyright services provided by the Libraries’ Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright

Smoothing the Transition to Mandatory Electronic Theses

After a year of voluntary submissions, Caltech is requiring electronic thesis submission for all graduate students effective July 1, 2002. Website development, user education, collaboration between library and campus computing staff, and with faculty and the dean's office are all integral to the transition

Policy formulation needed for the management and digital delivery of theses information

Though theses contain valuable information, least facility available in universities in India to deliver this information to the outside users. As compared to many western universities, researchers in India give less priority for publishing the theses in book or any other form. Similar system prevails in the case of other unpublished documents like dissertations, research reports, etc. Efforts of the national agencies like UGC, ICAR, etc. to digitize the theses and provide information on it to the researchers will reap maximum effectiveness if based on some national level policies and mandatory rules. This paper describes the need for establishing a national depository and frame rules for the mandatory depositing of the thesis at source in digital format

Evaluation of options for a UK electronic thesis service: study report

The British Library (BL), JISC, UK HE institutions and CURL have funded an 18-month project to develop a national framework for the provision, preservation and open access to electronic theses produced in UK HE institutions. The project, called EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) was developed in response to a competitive tender invitation released by the JISC and proposes a service set up and run by the British Library. The British Library’s current service, the British Thesis Service, offers access to around 180,000 doctoral theses, predominantly from 1970 onwards, though it is estimated that overall some half million theses dating from the 1600s are in existence in the UK. Around 80% of requests are for theses published within the last 13 years and almost all of these exist only in hardcopy. Through this service, theses are acquired ‘on demand’ and delivered on microfilm at a cost of just over £60 to the user (and at this price the service runs at a loss). Whilst this service, coupled with the Index to Theses (Expert Information), enables the location of and access to relatively recent British theses by the determined seeker, no one could argue that the process is optimised. As a result, usage of theses is much lower than it might be and much research is going unnoticed and unused as a result. Conversely, it has been shown that when theses are easy to locate and access, usage is high: at Virginia Tech, a pioneer site in the provision of a formal, systematised ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) service, downloads have been shown to increase over 30-fold when a thesis is available free online and easily located. A national service for the UK that provides discovery and access to theses in electronic form via the Web will increase the utility of doctoral scholarship. A single interface that directs users to theses wherever they are held, and which addresses the issues of intellectual property, permissions, royalties, preservation, discovery, and other matters associated with the public provision of theses in electronic form, will be of great benefit to the scholarly community in the UK and across the world. The EThOS project (Electronic Theses Online Service) was commissioned to develop a model for a workable, sustainable and acceptable national service for the provision of open access to electronic doctoral theses. The EThOS project team have completed the task and UCL Library Services in partnership with Key Perspectives Ltd have been asked to undertake a consultative study to assess the acceptability of the proposed model to the UK higher education community in the context of other potential models. This document reports the results of this consultative study, including a set of recommendations to JISC and other stakeholders for setting up a UK national e-theses service. The stakeholders other than JISC are: The British Library University administrators (registrars) Graduate students and recent PhDs Librarians Institutional repository managers Other e-theses services including: DART-Europe DiVA DissOnline Australasian Digital Theses Theses Canada Networked Digital Library for Theses and Dissertations The EThOS tea

Bibliography on open access in Latin America and the Caribbean

Bibliography on open access in Latin America and the Caribbean. Selection mainly based on open access publications describing open access initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Prepared for UNESCO-Latin America and the Caribbean Section of the UNESCO-GOAP Global Open Access Portal

Integrating digital document acquisition into a university library : A case study of social and organizational challenges

In this article we report on the effort of the university library of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration to integrate a digital library component for research documents authored at the university into the existing library infrastructure. Setting up a digital library has become a relatively easy task using the current data base technology and the components and tools freely available. However, to integrate such a digital library into existing library systems and to adapt existing document acquisition work-flows in the organization are non-trivial tasks. We use a research frame work to identify the key players in this change process and to analyze their incentive structures. Then we describe the light-weight integration approach employed by our university and show how it provides incentives to the key players and at the same time requires only minimal adaptation of the organization in terms of changing existing work-flows. Our experience suggests that this light-weight integration offers a cost efficient and low risk intermediate step towards switching to exclusive digital document acquisition

OCRIS : online catalogue and repository interoperability study. Final report

The aims and objectives of OCRIS were to: • Survey the extent to which repository content is in scope for institutional library OPACs, and the extent to which it is already recorded there; • Examine the interoperability of OPAC and repository software for the exchange of metadata and other information; • List the various services to institutional managers, researchers, teachers and learners offered respectively by OPACs and repositories; • Identify the potential for improvements in the links (e.g. using link resolver technology) from repositories and/or OPACs to other institutional services, such as finance or research administration; • Make recommendations for the development of possible further links between library OPACs and institutional repositories, identifying the benefits to relevant stakeholder groups