In "Five Dozen Doctoral Students Chose Bits and Bytes over Ink and Paper," Kathleen J. Sullivan discusses Stanford University's ETD program.

Here's an excerpt:

Most of the Stanford graduate students who uploaded their dissertations—47 out of 60—chose to display their dissertations in their entirety.

Most of the students—52 out of 60—selected the "attribution non-commercial" license from Creative Commons. . . .

More than half of the doctoral students—36 out of 60—chose to release their dissertation immediately. Ten of them chose to delay the release for six months; nine chose a one-year embargo; five chose a two-year delay.

Stanford University will implement an electronic dissertation program this month.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Speaking at the Oct. 22 Faculty Senate meeting, University Librarian Michael Keller said the digital world offers a "much greater palette of expression" to graduate students, because they will be able to include more graphics, color and character sets in their dissertations than in paper copies.

"[There will be] more opportunities to link to online resources and to have those links live," Keller said during a joint presentation on the program with University Registrar Thomas Black.

The program is the result of a yearlong collaboration between Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources and the Registrar's Office.

Under the program, digital dissertations will be stored in the Stanford Digital Repository, which provides preservation services for scholarly resources, helping to ensure their integrity, authenticity and usability over time.

Keller said the documents will be available to the Stanford community through Socrates, the university's online library catalog, and "available to the world" through Google, which will serve as a third-party distributor. He said the library will print one copy of each work and store it in the Stanford University Archives.

JISC has released the ICE-TheOREM Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

ICE-TheOREM was a project which made several important contributions to the repository domain, promoting deposit by integrating the repository with authoring workflows and enhancing open access by prototyping new infrastructure to allow fine-grained embargo management within an institution without impacting on existing open access repository infrastructure.

In the area of scholarly communications workflows, the project produced a complete end-to-end demonstration of eScholarship for word processor users, with tools for authoring, managing and disseminating semantically-rich ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) documents fully integrated with supporting data. This work is focused on theses, as it is well understood that early career researchers are the most likely to lead the charge in new innovations in scholarly publishing and dissemination models.

The authoring tools are built on the ICE content management system, which allows authors to work within a word processing system (as most authors do) with easy-to-use toolbars to structure and format their documents. The ICE system manages both small data files and links to larger data sets. The result is research publications which are available not just as paper-ready PDF files but as fully interactive semantically aware web documents which can be disseminated via repository software such as ePrints, DSpace and Fedora as complete supported web-native and PDF publications.

Stevan Harnad has self-archived the text of his "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates" presentation in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

A growing number of universities are beginning to require the digital deposit of their thesis and dissertation output in their institutional repositories. At the same time, a growing number of universities as well as research funders are beginning to mandate that all refereed research must be deposited too. This makes for a timely synergy between the practices of the younger and older generation of researchers as the Open Access era unfolds. It also maximizes the uptake, usage and impact of university research input at all stages, as well as providing rich and powerful new metrics to monitor and reward research productivity and impact. It is important to integrate universities' ETD and research output repositories, mandates and metrics as well as to provide the mechanism for those deposits that may need to be made Closed Access rather than Open Access: Repositories need to implement the "email eprint request" Button for all Closed Access Deposits. Any would-be user webwide, having reached the metadata of a Closed Access Deposit can, with one click, request an eprint for research purposes; the author instantly receives an automatic email and can then, again with one click, authorize the automatic emailing of one copy to the user by the repository software. This feature is important for fulfilling immediate research usage needs during any journal-article embargo period, and it also gives the authors of dissertations they hope to publish as books a way to control who has access to the dissertation. Digital dissertations will also benefit from the reference-linking and book-citation metrics that will be provided by harvesters of the distributed institutional repository metadata (which will also include the metadata and reference lists of all university book output). Dissertation downloads as well as eprint-requests will also provide useful new research impact metrics

Conference proceedings, a conference summary, and videos of plenary sessions from ETD2009: Bridging the Knowledge Divide are now available. This is an important conference on electronic theses and dissertations.

In "ICE for Theses (ThesICE), Where We Are We Up To?," Peter Sefton, Manage of Software Research and Development Laboratory at the Australian Digital Futures Institute, discusses ThesICE (ICE for Theses).

Here's an excerpt:

Assuming that you have the resources to support ICE, which I’ll cover below there are a few reasons why an institution might want to use it for theses specifically.

• It provides a well tested general purpose way to design templates, with a standard set of style names, so even if none of the other features appeal ICE templates might. . . .

• You can present theses in HTML as well as PDF. . . .

  It is possible to deposit from ICE into a repository via SWORD APP; we have plugins for ePrints and Fedora only at the moment, not for Dspace which is what they use at ANU.

• It provides annotation services . . . If you are running ICE either from a desktop or the server version then you can collaborate via paragraph-level annotations, but at the moment we don’t have a way to do the workflow that would be required to allow examiners to do this. . . .

• You can integrate data into a document via links, making it Linked Data – at least, we have proved the concept on the ICE-TheOREM project, but this would need to be worked out discipline by discipline.

Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) has released Web Services and Repositories: Report from an EThOSnet project workshop, British Library, 2nd June 2009.

Here's an excerpt:

One of the areas highlighted for potential investigation was the use of Web Services in supporting the delivery of EThOS. Due to staff changes following the start of the project it was not possible to carry out this investigation on the technical level that had been originally hoped. Nevertheless, an initial investigation was carried out to assess options. In considering the role of Web Services in supporting EThOS, it was concluded that it was not possible for the most part to consider the needs of EThOS alone, as using Web Services is primarily about communication between systems. EThOS has been developed on a model of ongoing interaction with institutional repositories, and as such the role of Web Services in supporting these local repository instances is key to the success of EThOS making use of them. Furthermore, given the development of local repositories as systems that need to interact with other systems, either within an institution or outside it, it seemed timely to address this issue to provide guidance to the community as a whole.

A workshop to investigate the potential value and use of Web Services to digital repositories was thus organised to both disseminate and capture information on the possibilities. This report summarises much of the information and conclusions from the workshop, and accompanies the full resources from the day available at http://www.ethos.ac.uk/0031_Web_Services_Day.html.

The Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 4 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.

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries, see the Digital Scholarship Publications Overview. (This document is especially useful if one of the mirrored Digital Scholarship servers is down.)

• .Com: http://digital-scholarship.com/cwb/dsoverviewx.htm
• .Org: http://digital-scholarship.org/cwb/dsoverviewx.htm

Shawn Averkamp and Joanna Lee have published "Repurposing ProQuest Metadata for Batch Ingesting ETDs into an Institutional Repository" in the latest issue of the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This article describes the workflow used by the University of Iowa Libraries to populate their institutional repository and their catalog with the data collected by ProQuest UMI Dissertation Publishing during the submission of students' theses and dissertations. Re-purposing the metadata from ProQuest allowed the University of Iowa Libraries to streamline the process for ingesting theses and dissertations into their institutional repository The article includes a discussion of the benefits and limitations of the workflow described.

Papers from the ETD 2009: 12th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations are now available.