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Electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repositories: What are

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 OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives
Electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repositories: What are they? Where do they
come from? How do they work?
Kristin Yiotis
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Kristin Yiotis, (2008),"Electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repositories", OCLC Systems & Services:
International digital library perspectives, Vol. 24 Iss 2 pp. 101 - 115
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Ifeanyi J. Ezema, C.I. Ugwu, (2013),"Electronic theses and dissertations in Nigeria university
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dx.doi.org/10.1108/EL-08-2011-0118
Aquil Ahmed, Sulaiman Alreyaee, Azizur Rahman, (2014),"Theses and dissertations in institutional
repositories: an Asian perspective", New Library World, Vol. 115 Iss 9/10 pp. 438-451 http://
dx.doi.org/10.1108/NLW-04-2014-0035
Shalini Ramdas Lihitkar, R.S. Lihitkar, (2014),"Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in India:
a comparative study", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 31 Iss 2 pp. 9-14 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/
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Electronic theses and dissertation ETD repositories

(ETD) repositories
What are they? Where do they come from?
How do they work? 101
Kristin Yiotis Received June 2007
Sutter Health, Sunnyvale, California, USA Revised November 2007
Accepted December 2007
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Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the electronic theses and dissertation (ETD)
repository as a subset of local institutional digital repositories. The paper discusses the originating
institutions and organizations including Virginia Tech Initiative, the Networked Digital Library of
Theses and Dissertations, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and
the United States Department of Education.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper is informational in nature and explores the topic of
ETD repositories. It provides information relevant to academic and digital librarians interested in
including an ETD repository in their institution’s digital library. The paper discusses interoperability
among repositories and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The paper
discusses issues related to ETD repositories including intellectual property rights, publishers’ views of
ETDs as prior publications, plagiarism issues, development costs, and long-term preservation issues.
Findings – It was found that library administrators who implemented ETD repositories at various
universities adapted their models to the needs of their institutions and their graduate students. ETD
administrators made decisions about implementation models and software and hardware
infrastructure in terms of human and technical resource allocation.
Practical implications – The paper argues that ETD repositories benefit students and universities
by enhancing graduate education, expanding graduate research, increasing a university’s visibility,
and instructing students, faculty, administration, and librarians about digital technology.
Originality/value – The value of this paper for digital and academic librarians concerned with EDT
repositories is in providing a historical overview, a discussion of the benefits, and a review of the
issues involved with implementing an ETD repository at their institution.
Keywords Database management, Digital storage, Theses, Academic libraries
Paper type Research paper

Theses, including doctoral dissertations, are a “cherished academic genre” of literature

that American academic libraries have held in their collections for over a century
dating back to the first dissertation submitted, “a six-page, hand written thesis at Yale
University in 1860” (Moxley, 2001, Tradition and ETDs section, para. 2). “The quality
of a university is reflected by the quality of its students’ intellectual products. Theses
and dissertations reflect an institution’s ability to lead students and support original
work” (UNESCO, 2001, 2.1 section). OCLC Systems & Services:
International digital library
Theses and dissertations from all academic departments become part of the perspectives
Vol. 24 No. 2, 2008
university’s library collection. Once approved, students submit to the university pp. 101-115
library several print copies that the library binds, catalogs, and shelves. In general, q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1065-075X
circulation is limited to the university community, as most libraries do not lend theses DOI 10.1108/10650750810875458
 OCLC and dissertations through interlibrary loan. Circulation records from Virginia
24,2 Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) show that 15,335 theses and
dissertations were approved between 1990 and 1994. In 1998, 3,967 were checked out,
which is 3.86 percent of the total (Moxley, 2001, para. 2). In other words each one was
checked out 0.0386 times.
Technological changes in the 1970s enabled students to produce theses and
102 dissertations on electric typewriters, a vast improvement from the manual typewriters
before that. By the 1980s the digital revolution arrived and word processing software
programs eliminated the need to create carbon copies. Users could save copies of their
work in digital format, edit their work before printing, and print multiple copies that
were all originals.
When students want a wider audience for their work, they submit print copies at
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their own cost to University Microfilms Dissertation Abstracts (UMI). UMI, now owned
by ProQuest, is the central repository and disseminator for North American print
dissertations for the past 50 years (Moxley, 2001, Lost opportunities section, para. 4).
UMI converted them to portable document format (PDF) files and made the copies
available through their current research service.

Moving to electronic format

In 1987, UMI initiated a movement toward digital dissertations by calling a meeting to
discuss the concept (Crowe, 1998, UMI section). In 1992, the Coalition for Networked
Information (CNI), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech),
the Council of Graduate Schools, and UMI started a project called “The capture and
storage of electronic theses and dissertations” for the purpose of promoting
applications and standards for capturing and storing theses and dissertations
electronically (Crowe, 1998, Background section). One outcome was UMI’s ProQuest
digital dissertations program that ensured digital formatting for the 1997 submissions.
UMI began accepting submissions in electronic format and scanning and digitizing
paper and microform submissions (Crowe, UMI section).
In December 2006, UMI current research service migrated to the ProQuest platform
and was re-named Dissertations & Theses Full Text (Dissertations & Theses @, 2007).
This subscription-based service provides free access to citations and abstracts in the
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) database and allows users to view for free
the first 24 pages of dissertations and download full text copies when available. Users
can also pay per print or digital copy if their institution does not subscribe to the
ProQuest service.
Another outcome was the CNI agreement to work with Cornell University, the
University of Michigan, Penn State, and Virginia Tech to “develop and disseminate
a standard method of using SGML (standard generalized markup language) to make
dissertations available online” with initial funding coming from the Southeastern
Universities Research Association (SURA) (Crowe, Background section). Virginia Tech
submitted a grant proposal to the United States Department of Education to create the
national digital library of theses and dissertations. Fox et al. (1996), the proposal
writers, defined the problem: students receiving the 400,000 master’s and doctoral
degrees awarded each year lacked basic information literacy skills and were
unprepared for futures in which electronic publishing and accessing networked
information systems would be commonplace (abstract). In addition, human and
 material resources invested in generating and preserving theses and dissertations were ETD repositories
wasted because access to them was “severely constrained” and “opportunities to
unlock valuable university resources” were missed, “greatly limiting possibilities of
knowledge transfer and re-use, and causing the whole academic enterprise to suffer”
(Fox et al., 1996, Abstract).
The proposal called for the creation of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and
Dissertations (NDLTD, 2006), a federation of member institutions and organization 103
that would “support and encourage the production and archiving of electronic theses
and dissertations” (Suleman and Fox, 2003, Abstract). They argued that repositories
for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) would benefit the entire university and
further its academic enterprise by enhancing graduate education, preserving and
disseminating knowledge, and advancing current technology to support multimedia
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publishing in digital libraries (Suleman and Fox, 2003, Introduction section). Funding
of more than $1,200,000 from the Department of Education and Corporations, including
Adobe, IBM, and Microsoft, enabled Virginia Tech to become the lead institution in
promoting ETDs as a new genre of literature that, according to the developers, would
have far reaching effects on graduate education (Crowe, 1998, Virginia Tech Initiative
section).

NDLTD and UNESCO support ETDs

NDLTD focused on three main issues: improving graduate education by making
students information literate, “developing and testing models . . . to arrive at standards
for document formats and interoperability,” and on encouraging institutions to join
NDLTD in free membership (Crowe, 1998, Virginia Tech initiative section). In 1999, the
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) became
interested in ETDs as resources that promote access to information in the public
domain through the use of the internet. UNESCO’s mandate, “to ensure the ‘free
exchange of ideas and knowledge’ was consistent with NDLTD’s goals for ETDs”
(Smith, 2002, ETDs are here section). UNESCO:
[. . .] hosted an ETD workshop to discuss the strategy for an international ETD initiative [. . .]
in the interest of developing an international project that facilitated transfer of expertise from
developed countries to developing countries in scientific areas [. . .] (Smith, 2002, ETDs are
here section).
In 2000, UNESCO supported Virginia Tech in initiating an online guide of best
practices for developing ETD programs. This 420-page document, The Guide for
Electronic Thesis and Dissertations, (http://etdguide.org) collects articles by experts
from all over the world, many previously published, on practical information and best
practices for all areas of ETD development and implementation. This manual serves to
document the ETD initiative and to address the concerns of universities hosting ETD
repositories and students writing ETDs (UNESCO, 2001, Contents section).

Benefits of ETDs
The primary mission of NDLTD is to help graduate students become information
literate by making ETD an institutional requirement. According to NDLTD, the
underlying purpose of ETD activity is “to prepare the next generation of scholars to
function effectively as knowledge workers in the Information Age” (Fox, 2001,
 OCLC Purpose, goals, objectives section). NDLTD’s founders envisioned a worldwide
24,2 program of ETDs that “enhance graduate education, promote sharing of research, and
support university collaboration” (Fox, 2001, Purpose, goals, objectives section). These
goals would be achieved through specific objectives:
.
students knowing how to contribute to and use digital libraries;
104 .
universities developing digital library service;
.
worldwide sharing of university research; and
.
a higher quality and greater expressiveness of graduate theses and dissertations
(Fox, 2001, Purpose, goals, objectives section).

Students, then, are the primary beneficiaries of ETDs. Fox (2001, Students section)
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writes, “Students are the most important participants in ETD activities”. By learning to
use and promoting ETDs, students will benefit in two ways: “The first benefit is that
new, better types of [theses and dissertations] (TDs) may emerge as ETDs develop as
a genre” (Fox, 2001, Students section). Moxley (2001) sees a future where “creative
researchers will challenge our conception of academic writing. Linear text with
one-inch margins will give way to hypertextual writing, streaming multimedia,
interactive chat spaces, three-dimensional modeling . . . ” (Providing the tools section).
Moxley refers readers to Pockley’s (1996) online doctoral thesis, “The flight of ducks”,
which has been accessed by more than one million distinct computers as an example.
Kirschenbaum’s (1997) doctoral thesis, “Lines for a virtual t[y/o]pography: electronic
essays on artifice and information”, provides another example.
The second benefit to students is the improved visibility and increased exposure
their work undergoes when placed in an electronic repository. ETDs showcase the
intellectual achievements of a university by making them available to a worldwide
audience. A university’s ETD, according to Moxley (2001, para. 2), “raises significant
interest in the work of its graduate students.” “Graduate students and their sponsoring
faculty could benefit from increased exposure of their work, both in job and other
financial opportunities and in profession reputation” (Moxley, 2001, para. 1). ETDs are
more accessible than traditional theses and circulate more. In 2000-2001, when Virginia
Tech had 3,393 ETDs in its collection, 1,565,151 PDFs were downloaded by users,
meaning that on average each ETD was downloaded 461 times (Moxley, 2001, para. 2).
Universities also potentially benefit from ETD repositories. Moxley (2001), writing
in the UNESCO Guide, reason:
Theses and dissertations reflect an institution’s ability to lead students and support original
work [. . .] As digital libraries of ETDs become more commonplace, students and faculty will
make judgments regarding the quality of a university by reviewing its digital library
(2.1. Why ETD’s? section).
Moxley (2001, para. 1) states, “In future a university’s quality will be linked to its
digital library of theses and dissertations . . . ”
UNESCO (2001) envisions that the benefits ETDs have on students will reflect on
universities and on entire societies, countries, and regions (2.1.1., Reasons and
strategies section). Benefits overlap from student to university to society in the
following ways (UNESCO, 2001, 2.1.1., Reasons and strategies section):
 .
Scholarship builds on scholarship such that increased access to information and ETD repositories
research enhances the quality of theses and dissertations and knowledge in
general.
.
ETDs are a way of sharing intellectual production because they make the results
of graduate programs widely known.
.
Theses and dissertations (TDs) present the methods used during research, thus
allowing these methods to be used by others.
105
.
To electronically publish TDs makes the results known nationally and
internationally, and ETDs can identify and connect national and international
research groups.
.
Wide knowledge of good quality TDs strengthens the faculty, the graduate
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programs, and the university such that graduate programs may be evaluated by
the number of theses and dissertations that are accessible electronically.
.
TDs are part of the assets and of the history of the universities. Since they are
published on paper, why not publish them electronically where they require less
storage space?
.
In countries where theses and dissertations are financed by public funds, authors
are expected to make their work public, and ETDs are the easiest way to
accomplish this.
.
An ETD program introduces digital libraries in the university allowing other
projects to bloom.

In a SPARC position paper titled, “The case for institutional repositories,” Crow (2002)
discusses other benefits that institutional digital repositories, which include ETDs,
bring to libraries:
Establishing an institutional repository program indicates that a library seeks to move
beyond a custodial role to contribute actively to the evolution of scholarly communication
[. . .] Institutional repository programs promise libraries an extraordinary level of visibility
within the university [. . .] The library’s relevance to the faculty – and, consequently, the
institution overall – will increase. (Crow, 2002, Impact of institutional repositories section,
para. 1).

How ETDs get started

ETDs are basically a subset of an institution’s local digital repository. An institutional
repository (IR), as defined by Crow (2002), is:
[. . .] a digital archive of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff, and
students of an institution and accessible to end-users both within and outside of the
institution, with few if any barriers to access (Essential elements section).
Academic libraries usually host the institution’s local repository within their digital
library, such as the California Digital Library (CDL), which is the IR for the libraries of
the ten University of California (UC) campuses.
Having an existing digital library, which most large research universities have,
makes it easier to institute an ETD repository. Since 2002, George Mason University’s
Fenwick Library has maintained the Mason Archival Repository Service (MARS).
 OCLC According to D. Salo, Digital Repository Services Librarian, the library is currently in
24,2 the process of creating an ETD (personal communication, April 19, 2006). Fenwick
Library has submitted a proposal to the university administration to institute and
maintain an ETD through MARS. Their proposal reviews the limitations to the current
method for submitting theses and dissertations and recommends a new policy that
requires one electronic copy in addition to one paper copy stressing that for the present
106 the new policy will not eliminate the traditional paper version of the scholarly paper
(D. Salo, personal communication, April 19, 2006).
Johns Hopkins University, Sheridan Libraries manages the Library Digital
Programs (LDP), which includes digital services, digital collections, and research and
development initiatives. One initiative is an ETD. The Sheridan Library web site
explains that they have initiated a pilot project to study the various electronic
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publishing systems that host ETDs, the current systems being: DSpace, ePrints,
DPubS, and DiVA (Services, collections, & projects, 2005, para. 4). The site supplies
a sign-up sheet for those interested in participating in the pilot project, saying that
students from all departments may participate but that participation does not replace
the obligation to submit a paper version (Pilot program for ETDs, 2006).
Some universities populated their ETD repository by instituting an electronic copy
theses requirement in certain departments only. Vanderbilt University conducted
a pilot program in which certain department participated on a voluntary basis, but
within those departments electronic submission was mandatory (Smith, 2002, p. 5).
University of Kentucky also gave their students the option of submitting in electronic
or traditional format (Smith, 2002, p. 5). As of this writing, University of Kentucky still
offers the electronic thesis or dissertation as an option.
Other universities have made electronic copy submission mandatory for students
and have done away with the paper copy all together. Virginia Tech began requiring
all graduate students to submit electronic theses and dissertations in January 1997
(Seamans, 2003, p. 56). West Virginia University implemented a mandatory
submission policy based on the idea that ETDs “contribute to worldwide graduate
education and provide a means of ‘unlocking’ the under utilized results of academic
graduate research” (Smith, 2002, p. 6). Smith, quoting the Library Technical Consultant
for West Virginia University Libraries, writes:
The success of the ETD program has helped to create a “heightened sense of awareness on
campus of the profound effects of information technology,” and that this has helped to bring a
whole host of IT developments to the West Virginia campus (Smith, 2002, p. 6).
Smith (2002, p. 6) stresses that all the universities he researched offered workshops to
students to help them deal with the technical issues related to submitting theses and
dissertations in electronic format. He says that the methods established by NDLTD and
the Virginia Tech UNESCO Guide reduced the difficulty of developing from scratch the
technological expertise needed to teach faculty, students, and administrators, and
libraries about ETDs (p. 6).
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Theses in DSpace (2002) repository
contains “selected theses and dissertations from all MIT departments [and] contains
approximately 10,000 theses completed at MIT between 1879 and the present” (para. 1).
The web site explains that after 2004 “all new Masters and PhD theses will be scanned
 and will be added to this collection after degrees are awarded,” and provides directions ETD repositories
for graduated students who want to submit a theses (Theses in DSpace, para, 2).

Choosing software and implementation models

ePrints is the original, open-source, repository software developed at the University of
Southampton in Great Britain. The ePrints solution, as explained by Tennant (2002), 107
“is squarely focused on the faculty working paper, (called preprint or e-print) . . . and
assumes that faculty will directly upload their own prepublication . . . via an
institutional . . . repository,” a model that is currently being used at CalTech and the
Digital Library of the Commons at Indiana University (Software section). MIT
developed DSpace as a digital repository technology that is considered by experts to be
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more flexible and robust than the ePrints software because “it makes fewer
assumptions regarding what type of object is being uploaded” (Tennant, 2002,
Software section).
DSpace is currently being used in institutional repositories all over the world, as
shown on the DSpace Instances web site. A quick look shows ETDs at the following
institutions: DSpace@SLU (Saint Louis University, Phillippines); DSpace at Ural State
University, Russia; ETD of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (etd@IISc), India;
MSpace at the University of Manitoba, Canada; Nagoya Repository, Nagoya
University, Japan; OdinPubAfrica (15 African nations); Oregon State University (USA);
QUEprints Cranfield University (UK).
Tennant (2002), at the CDL, discusses implementation models as a next step after
choosing software in creating an IR. “There are nearly as many models as there are
institutional repositories,” Tennant (2002, Implementation models section) states. The
three examples he focuses on, distributed, semidistributed and semicentralized, have to
do with management and assigning uploading responsibilities.
In the distributed model, the original self-archiving model that Harnad and others
had in mind when starting the Open-Archives Initiative, individual faculty upload their
own scholarly output into the repository through a software platform. Institutions that
follow this model, such as Virginia Tech, provide support in the form of workshops,
tutorials and submission instructions at the web site. The DSpace software platform
has the broadest application in terms of being able to handle any educational material
in digital format, such as lecture notes, visualizations, simulations, original graphics,
datasets, images, thereby enabling faculty to make full use of the repository. The
ePrints platform was designed specifically for prepublished manuscripts. In terms of
ETDs, the distributed model enables students to manage their own formatting issues,
such as making PDF files, and directly upload their electronic copy.
The semidistributed model “assigns management responsibilities to organizational
units . . . that . . . assist faculty [and students] with uploading their papers” (Tennant,
2002, Implementation models section). The CDL’s eScholarship repository, explains
Tennant, uses this model. CDL describes its eScholarship Repository as a “free,
open-access repository infrastructure [that] provides UC departments direct control of
publishing scholarly materials such as postprints, journals and peer-reviewed series,
and seminar papers” (Collections & services, 2006). The eScholarship web site lists the
library liaisons who are available to assist faculty and students for each UC campus
(Campus eScholarship liaisons, 2005).
 OCLC The semi-centralized model assigns responsibility to the library to set up and
24,2 manage a repository site for any university unit and to upload papers on behalf of
faculty. California Technical Institute (CalTech) uses this model for their Collection of
Open Digital Archives (CODA, 2006), their generic IR that holds faculty research
papers and more, and runs on the ePrints software platform (Tennant, 2002,
Implementation models section).
108 The CalTech ETD repository requires students to submit theses and dissertations
online and walks them though all aspects of the submission sequence from thesis
regulations to faculty approval (CalTech Library Services, 2006). The CalTech ETD
repository uses the ETD-db open-source software platform developed for
theses-specific repositories at Virginia Tech. Students are provided with information
and instructions for walking through the entire submission process. An ETD database
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developer’s resource is available for students to implement their own ETD databases
and includes information about the technologies used to implement the ETD-db
(CalTech ETD-db, 2006). The developer’s information and instructions are identical to
those at the ETD homepage at Virginia Tech and appear highly technical to the novice.
Wong (2006) discusses the software platforms the City University of Hong Kong
Library (CityU) considered for their ETD repository and their IR. For the ETD
repository, options included the E-thesis-specific ETD-db, developed at Virginia Tech,
or generic repository software, such as DSpace or ePrints (Wong, 2006, 5. E-theses in
CityU IR section). Virginia Tech’s software, ETD-db, contains a submission module, a
theses-specific metadata set, and a workplace for faculty supervision and approval.
DSpace, a generic repository platform, is “better supported . . . in terms of data
structure, security, administration and future expansion” (Wong, 2006, para. 6). CityU
Library chose DSpace for their ETD repository based on Wong’s conclusion that “the
ETD-MS [Metadata Standard] supported by ETD-db [was] not totally OAI compliant
[which] may create an obstacle in metadata harvesting,” the platform they also chose
for their IR (Wong, 2006, para. 6).
CityU Library made use of a comparison study between ETD-db and DSpace
platforms conducted by Edinburgh University Library while in the process of
developing Theses Alive! “a software solution for institutions in the UK to implement
their own E-theses or ETD online submission system and repository” (Jones, 2004,
Introduction section, para. 1). The Library compared the two platforms in the following
areas: general overview, submissions procedures, archiving and access, administration
and security. They conclude, “DSpace is clearly ahead of ETD-db. It is a
well-supported package with a future that is being planned now, while ETD-db has
been dormant for some time” (Jones, 2004, Overall, Conclusions section, para. 1). The
ETD-Metadata Standard current version, dated May 6, 2001, is available at the
NDLTD web site (2004, Document history section).

Protocol and interoperability

Whichever software platform a repository chooses, all adhere to standards of
interoperability and metadata harvesting laid down in 1999 at the Santa Fe Convention
as the Open Archives Initiative. At this convention, various organizations, including
NDLTD and the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library, met to
develop a solution for large-scale interoperability between digital repositories
(Suleman and Fox, 2003, Early efforts section). Today the Open Archives Initiative
 Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is an interoperability framework “based ETD repositories
on HTTP, which facilitates the . . . transfer of metadata among networked systems”
(Suleman and Fox, OAI protocol section).
The OAI-PMH framework allows for two types of participation: the data providers
at the input end and the service providers at the output end. Each institution’s ETD
functions as a data provider. However, unless these disparate repositories are joined in
some way, each one must be searched independently. The protocol is ideas for created 109
distributed ETD repositories searched through a centralized networked digital library,
the original vision for the NDLTD. The metadata harvesting capability, built into the
OAI-PMH standards, enable OAI service providers to collect or “harvest” metadata
from all repositories into a central site and then republishing it as a single collection.
The NDLTD Union Archive is the centralized site for NDLTD members. Any local
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ETD site, then, can harvest from the NDLTD Union Catalog using its own search and
browse capabilities (Suleman and Fox, 2003, NDLTD Union Archive section).
Interoperability requires that repositories use standardized metadata tags, such as
SGML/XML and other mark-up languages that assign unique identifiers to items
within a repository. OAI-PMH requests use the identifiers to extract metadata from the
item (OAI-PMH: Definitions and Concepts, 2004). Service providers, like the NDLTD
Union Archive, are able to harvest, index, and search metadata from remote sites, store
it, and then republish this metadata through their own OAI data provider interface
(Suleman and Fox, 2003, NDLTD Union Archive section).
Registered service providers (2005) lists registered providers of search service based
on harvesting metadata using the OAI metadata harvesting protocol. Registered data
providers (2007) lists the 610 repositories that conform to OAI standards. These are the
repositories that the service providers search. ARC – A cross archives search
service (2004), the first federated search service based on OAI-PMH, is an experimental
service supported by Old Dominion University, Digital Library Research Group. As of
this writing ARC is not currently running. All service providers like ARC and Citebase,
another experimental search service run by the University of Southampton, harvest
metadata from the OAI the data providers, including institutional repositories, ETD
repositories, and open access journals (Citebase, 2007).
OAIster, a service provider based at the University of Michigan Digital Library
Production Service, makes accessible “collections of freely available, previously
difficult to access, academically oriented, digital resources” (OAIster, 2006). OAIster’s
homepage says it provides access to 11,003,628 records from 754 institutions’ open
archive repositories, some of which are ETDs. OAIster allows users to search and
browse by citation, keyword, or by IR with each one named and its contents briefly
described, whereas ARC allows searching by citation or by IR without names given in
full or any descriptions. OAIster is one of the three official search services that extracts
thesis and dissertation records from OCLC’s XTCat Experimental Theses Catalog
(XTCat, 2002). WorldCat and the NDLTD Union Catalog are the other two (XTCat,
2002). As discussed earlier, the NDLTD Union Catalog also enables federated
searching of the ETD repositories of the 174 member libraries of the NDLTD
consortium (Browse/search ETDs, 2006).
Starting this spring UMI ProQuest will institute an Open Access publishing option
for dissertations and theses, in addition to their traditional publishing option. For an
increased fee, graduate students can choose to publish in PQDT Open, a new ProQuest
 OCLC online repository of Open Access graduate works (UMI Open Access Publishing, 2007).
24,2 PQDT Open will comply with OAI protocol enabling search engines to index and
search the repository. Theses publishing in PQDT Open are available to anyone with
access to the Internet to read or download free of charge. University libraries can also
load the UMI published work into their institutional ETD repository for free ensuring
that the UMI-approved copy will be in circulation (UMI Open Access Publishing, 2007).
110
Key issues and concerns
Virginia Tech’s Fox (2001) discusses five key concerns about ETDs that each
institution has to address: ownership of property rights, what access is allowed, how
ETDs relate to publishers, the issue of plagiarism, and the matter of cost (what are key
concerns section). Similar concerns are brought up by other institutions. The
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University of Kentucky’s concerns include ownership issues including how ETDs

relate to intellectual property rights lost to publishers, plagiarism issues, costs of
software and hardware infrastructure, and long-term preservation issues (Smith, 2002,
p. 12).
Institutions are concerned that publishers will not publish articles, chapters, or
books derived from ETDs, and that students, advisors, or funding sources will lose
some of their full rights to their material. Fox (2001) discusses ownership rights of
ETDs as resting with authors in most institutions but some institutions request or
claim ownership. Where research has been sponsored, the funding agency may claim
rights (What are key concerns section, para. 2). Property rights for ETDs would not be
different than print theses simply because they are deposited in a digital repository
owned by a university; in other words authors do not give up property rights because
the university owns the repository in which the TD is deposited.
The issue of how ETDs relate to publishers has been under study. Seamans (2003)
researched “whether or not ETDs would be viewed as prior publications and would . . .
be ineligible for consideration for publication in traditional journals” (Abstract). She
reports on a survey of publishers that asked editors about ETDs as prior publications.
The survey discovered that “94 percent of . . . respondents stated that the journal had
a policy on prior publications . . . but that 68 percent . . . stated that these policies did
not specifically refer to works . . . posted on the Web or made available electronically”
(Seamans, 2003, p. 56). Publishers most frequent comment was about the differences
between a thesis or dissertation and a work derived from one, “regardless of whether
the [original] work was in electronic or paper format” (Seamans, 2003, p. 60). Publishers
reported that authors usually had to rewrite dissertations or theses before they could
be accepted for publications as books or articles (Seamans, 2003, p. 60). So publishers
do not necessarily see an ETD as an obstacle to a future publication based on the
earlier work.
Publishers’ attitudes toward ETDs directly relates to the access level allowed,
whether access would be limited in any way. Seamans (2003, p. 56) suggests four levels
of access ranging from “worldwide access to the entire document to securing the entire
work with no access allowed to any part of the document.” Students are afraid that if
publishers considered an ETD a prepublished work, this would hurt their chance of
publishing their work later in a journal or as a book. Fox’s (2001, What are key
concerns section) suggestion to students who are working on a book is to limit access
to the university community and to discuss the issue with a publisher before posting
 the ETD. Fox claims little evidence that “public access to an ETD will hurt future sales ETD repositories
of an eventual published book” (What are key concerns section, para. 4). Fox also
discusses students’ responsibility to get permission from publishers for content in their
ETD that is similar to an earlier published work (What are key concerns section).
Another concern is plagiarism. It is easier for students to plagiarize within their
ETD and from others’ ETD because of increased access to electronic documents and
the copy and paste features. Search features, however, make detecting plagiarism 111
easier as well. Every university has policies in place regarding plagiarism and these
will have to be enforced as well as fair-use restrictions (Fox, 2001, What are key
concerns section).
The concern with costs includes increased financial and work burdens on students
and academic departments. Additional university personnel may be needed to
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“propose, publicize, initiate, refine, and institutionalize the [ETD] activities” and
preparation (Fox, 2001, What are key concerns section, para. 6). If “ETDs instead of
paper TDs are required, there should be net savings relative to old processing
methods,” claims Fox (2001, What are key concerns section, para. 6). But if paper copies
are still needed by theses advisory committees, ETDs increase rather than decrease the
burden of work for students and increase expenses for students and departments if
software and equipment must be purchased (Smith, 2002, p. 12).
The UNESCO Guide (2001, p. 87) states start-up costs as relating to infrastructure
and training, such as whether or not an institution already has a digital library in place
and if the network infrastructure is provided by the host institution. Start up involves
costs in terms of human resources, infrastructure, and training. Human resources
include professionals, technicians, and management, with the professionals creating
the procedures and developing the tools, the technicians uploading theses and assisting
students, the management supervising day to day and communicating with university
administration (p. 88). Infrastructure includes the actual server and software with the
server site usually provided by the university, and materials, such as a workstation PC,
printer, and software provided by the library (p. 88). Training involves training team
members, organizing training, and developing training manuals, tutorials, and
documentation (p. 88).
There is the issue of preservation and the lack of long-term electronic archival
standards. Will the ETD be accessible in the long-term, or even the short-term, future?
Digital preservation is a national concern that is being worked on at the highest levels
of government. In 2005, Lockheed Martin was awarded a $308 million contract by
National Archives and Records Administration to build a permanent archives system
that will preserve and manage electronic records created by the federal government.
“The Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system will capture electronic information –
regardless of its format – save it permanently, and make it accessible on whatever
future hardware or software is currently in use” (Martin, 2005, para. 3).
The Government Printing Office (GPO) has accepted Adobe PDF as the preferred
document format. Most ETDs have also accepted “PDF as a low-cost solution for the
delivery of electronic documents” because of the reduced training and minimum start
up costs involved (Smith, 2002, p. 7). Nobody is sure that Adobe can guarantee the
long-term retention of its PDF format. A Preservation 2000 International Conference
statement by the GPO claims, “publications . . . that rely on a proprietary format or
 OCLC commercial software . . . pose serious challenges . . . since backward compatibility in
24,2 newer technology will depend on market forces and demand” (Smith, 2002, p. 8).
The GPO suggests transfer of all publications to a single. . . open standard format
such as HTML for text and TIFF for images. ETD operators have begun looking into
SGML and XML (extensible markup language) as alternatives to PDF but there are
disadvantages (Smith, 2002, p. 8). SGML was developed first but is argued to be too
112 complex to be easily adopted (Smith, 2002, p. 8). XML, developed in 1996 by the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a new standard, takes the parts of SGML that are
relevant to the internet (Smith, 2002, p. 8). XML has become as the language of choice
for transmitting data in a standardized format on the Web; e-commerce sites for
example use XML (Smith, 2002, p. 9).
Several institutions have explored XML for ETDs. Virginia Tech, for instance,
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created an XML tagging schema for encoding ETDs, but there are still major concerns.
One is universality – there is not one schema that covers all the possible elements that
may be found in theses and dissertations in all disciplines, each element such as the
math and science symbols requiring a unique tag. Another problem is the steep
learning curve for XML when compared with PDF. Departments would need to invest
resources and time in training graduate students to write an XML ETD (Smith, 2002,
p. 10).

Summary
This paper attempts to introduce ETDs and to build the case that ETDs add value by
enhancing graduate education, expanding graduate research, increasing a university’s
visibility, and instructing students, faculty, administration, and librarians about
digital technology. Issues discussed include the history of ETDs at various
universities, implementation models and software choices ETD administrators must
make, concepts involved in understanding ETDs such as protocol and interoperability,
and key issues and concerns such as intellectual property rights, publishers’ views of
ETD as prior publications, increased ease of plagiarism, costs in terms of human and
technical resources, and long-term preservation.

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Corresponding author
Kristin Yiotis can be contacted at: kyiotis@yahoo.com

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