Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD): An initiative at Central Library, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD): An initiative at Central Library, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Mahendra N. Jadhav

With the advancement in computerization and telecommunication, the Central Library, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) has been providing state-of-the-art electronic facility to its users. The trend is, towards digitizing traditional resources to eresources. Realizing digital revolution, Central library IITB undertook the work of ETD to provide access to research carried out at the Institute, to their students. The research is carried out at Masters and Doctorate level. In order to differentiate the research carried out at Masters Level, it is called as Dissertation and at Doctorate level it is called as Thesis. The Institute has established ETD as a signatory to the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) initiated with the Virginia Tech. University as leader of this worldwide project. Since January 1999, IITB has introduced first of its kind in India, 'Online Submission of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD)' of M. Tech. and Ph. D. students in addition to its printed copy. It is mandatory to submit full text and one page of abstract for postgraduate students. The work of creating a database of M. Tech. Dissertations and Ph. D. Theses through online submission of ETD was meticulously implemented and successfully accomplished. The paper primarily focuses on the work of digitization of ETD. The process of digitizing has been bifurcated into: 1 Online submission of M. Tech. Dissertations fro 1999 and Ph. D. Theses from 2000 onwards was started and Web server was set up at central library on Intranet at site http://etd.library.iitb.ac.in Infrastructure was available in the library. 2 Digitization of abstracts of Ph. D. Theses prior to 2000 to supplement ETD has been completed. The data (bibliographic with abstract) are made available on Internet using open source Greenstone Digital library Software. http://www.library.iitb.ac.in/~mnj/etd/ or http://purl.oclc.org/NET/iitbetd The paper explains infrastructure set up, storage devices and formats, conservation and preservation, intellectual property rights, dissemination, standards used, recommendations, future etc and finally conclusion. Different activities mentioned above, are supported by graphs, charts, tables etc wherever found to be suitable.

2002