Survey of US ETD Programs: Progress and State of Acceptance
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Survey of US ETD Programs: Progress and State of Acceptance
At present, we do not have good data on the state of adoption of ETD programs in US universities. No US national agency collects information on the deployment of ETD programs or tracks trends in this area. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE. Over 200 member institutions, including most US higher education institutions that have significant graduate education programs, belong to CNI. In addition, a group of liberal arts colleges that often have significant capstone projects for their senior students, are members of CNI. We are surveying these institutions to determine: the state of acceptance and deployment of ETD programs in US institutions, the degree of deployment (e.g. by department, mandatory institutional requirement, etc.), the strategy of management of the ETD collection, and the relationship of the ETD collection to the institutional repository. In addition, we are collecting information on perceptions of the key factors encouraging implementation of an institutional ETD program and key factors discouraging such implementation. We will include a comparison of the findings in US institutions to data available from national initiatives in other countries. [Note: we conducted a similar study with institutional repositories as the subject as part of a broader initiative co-sponsored by CNI, JISC, and SURF and the results were published in D-Lib Magazine: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lynch/09lynch.html]
2008