Electronic Theses and Dissertations and the Necessity of a New Culture of Electronic Publishing

Electronic Theses and Dissertations and the Necessity of a New Culture of Electronic Publishing

Peter Schirmbacher

The creating, using and supply of scholarly documents in a digital way by the internet is a new, additional and improved kind of scholarly communication in comparison to traditional paper-based procedure of publication. In this sense you can speak of a "culture of electronic publishing". That means that all participants in this process should work together and change their attitudes of minds. That starts with the authors, who should structure their texts in order to support the retrieval and also the long term archiving. We need a special collaboration and responsibility between university libraries and computing centres. The electronic publishing of theses and dissertations is a very good example for this changing situation. In many countries worldwide we can notice the alteration. So also in Germany where we have some special projects in this field. The German initiative for networked information (DINI) tried to summarize the different experiences and worked out a special paper called "Recommendations of electronic publishing in universities". In my presentation I will speak about the present situation in Germany, report on how to build up a document server, a policy for a university digital library and some special points of maintenance of integrity and authentification.

2003