Table of Contents

• Abstract
• 1. Introduction and History
  • 1.1. History of Dissertations
  • 1.2. History of ETDs
• 2. Initiatives
  • 2.1. Student Interest
  • 2.2. Other Related Efforts
  • 2.3. VT ETD Initiative
  • 2.4. NDLTD
• 3. VT Collection
  • 3.1. Statistics
  • 3.2. Case Study
• 4. Conclusions and Future Work
• 5. References
• 6. Acknowledgments

Abstract

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are a unique genre that is emerging in part as a result of the work to build the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. Virginia Tech began requiring ETDs on 1/1/97 and has received over 1200 already. Because of the flexibility of this genre, over half have some type of color image or other multimedia content; some have audio, video, or VRML files. Due to the arrangement of free access, a number have been downloaded (full PDF file) over a thousand times, one over ten thousand times. Because of the intense interest in these works, we expect quality to go up and for there to be greater learning and sharing of knowledge. This paper presents our findings as a case study of shifting to electronic documents, for large, book length works. As NDLTD spreads, we expect to have tens of thousands of these created each year, in locations all over the globe, meaning that there will be need for multilingual and federated digital library support.

1. Introduction and History

The advancement of civilization has been paralleled by advancements in the means of expression and sharing of knowledge. Since the expansion of the Internet in particular, there have been particularly dramatic changes in the whole enterprise of research and education. Figure 1 highlights some of the factors exerting influence, as seen by the authors, giving dates of particular importance to us. Affected by these changes, and now helping drive further change, are the key documents of graduate studies: theses, dissertations, project reports, technical reports, and other similar forms. For the sake of brevity we will refer to them as TDs.

These documents have been largely the concern of graduate students, faculty, and the research community. They also have been handled by libraries, which in effect "publish" them (unless that is handled by UMI or a university press, for example). As libraries rethink their roles, guided by historical insights, and recalling the basic motivation of knowledge sharing which is one of their core values, it is appropriate that libraries play a lead role in making theses and dissertations a more effective vehicle for comunicating university research results [GUED].

While this paper focuses on the emerging genre of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), it must do so in the context of social issues related to digital libraries [BORG96]. Thus, the reader is referred to the online materials, including papers and audio files (for presentations as well as discussion), of a recent seminar exploring the social, economic, technical and cultural issues related to ETDs and the broader enterprise of electronic publishing of scholarly information [VTRGS]. We begin our discussion of ETDs by tracing the history of TDs and then of ETDs.

1.1 History of Dissertations

Graduate education in the U.S. was launched in large part as a result of Americans visiting Germany, becoming involved in graduate research there, and bringing back good ideas like "freedom of thought, intensive research, and the reporting of results" [UMIb]. Institutions such as Johns Hopkins and Yale adopted these ideas and launched graduate programs. The one at Yale opened in 1860, and the first U.S. doctorate was awarded there: "The first recipient was James Morris Whiton, whose dissertation in Latin on the proverb 'Brevis vita, ars longa' was accepted in 1861. Handwritten, it was six pages long. " [UMIb].

The number of dissertations per year in the U.S. has grown to over fifty-thousand; these are "published" by UMI and listed in their Dissertation Abstracts database [UMIa]. Each year about four-hundred thousand graduate degrees are awarded in the U.S., making it the dominant force in awarding such degrees. While no accurate statistics exist regarding the number of masters theses and other similar documents prepared each year, the U.S. output is likely to exceed the number of dissertations. Clearly, the worldwide production of TDs is at least one-hundred thousand each year, and may reach 200,000 or more if all languages are considered.

UMI has over 1.4M entries in Dissertation Abstracts, with over 1M available in full-text [UMIa]. From their extensive archive, UMI staff can fetch a black-and-white microfilm copy of each old work on file, which then can be used to create a new microform or paper copy. For less than $30 one can obtain an unbound copy in a few days through one of their new services. Nevertheless, very few dissertations are ordered, and a tiny number indeed are ordered more than the seven times per year needed to warrant a royalty payment to the author. It is estimated that they royalty payments from UMI each year is approximately 2% of the amount paid to them by students to have their works published and archived.

From exploratory discussions with OCLC, based on Ed O'Neill's sampling of records in their WorldCat database, it appears that there are 2-4M TDs cataloged in libraries. While we will work with OCLC in upcoming months to explore this matter in more detail, it is clear that many theses are not made available from the library of the degree-granting institution, or that cataloging is incomplete, or that there are other problems. In any case, it is certain that the amount of knowledge sharing that takes place with TDs is rather scanty.

1.2 History of ETDs

In 1987, UMI hosted a workshop about electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) with a focus on applying SGML to the description of research. Nick Altair, a vice president of UMI, was involved in the application of SGML to electronic documents. Following this workshop, Virginia Tech provided $5000 to develop an SGML Document Type Definition (DTD), in conjunction with SoftQuad, so this idea could be pursued. Unhappily, tools to help authors create SGML documents were expensive and harder to use than common word processors, so this approach was only pursued with low priority. In 1996, when the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) provided about $90,000 to Virginia Tech to explore these matters further, project staff developed a Document Type Definition called ETD-ML, which has been repeatedly refined to be easy to use and yet powerful enough to capture the important metadata and structure of ETDs.

As technology developed to help make ETDs feasible, UMI made enlightened changes in its policies. It changed its agreements with students to only request non-exclusive license to archive and make copies on demand. It also defined a procedure by which electronic submissions could be made [UMId].

UMI worked with Virginia Tech and other interested parties to explore further about ETDs. Open meetings were held in 1992 and 1994 with at least ten universities sending representatives. Since these meetings began, the Council of Graduate Schools and the Coalition for Networked Information have been strong supporters as well. For the last several years, there has been a morning technical discussion about ETDs hosted by CNI prior to their fall and spring meetings; discussions also take place at CGS meetings.

Since the beginning of 1997, UMI has been scanning in all new works received, creating a PDF file which is essentially a wrapper around the black-and-white page images [UMIc]. These simple ETDs numbered over sixty-thousand as of spring 1998 and will grow at the rate of about five-thousand per month. While these can assist with access, they cannot convey what is expressed with gray scale or color, and miss details in works that use very small fonts or other symbols. Nevertheless, UMI's service is important and valuable, and marks a significant step forward toward a digital library of TDs.

Another type of ETD, discussed in more detail below, if one created, usually by the author, and shared in electronic form. This type of ETD has the advantage of including fonts and so being scalable, as well as being much more compact than the page image form.

2. Initiatives

As electronic publishing technologies developed, a number of parties have thought about ETDs. Of particular importance are the students, who write the works and who often desire to use approaches that are more expressive than black ink on white paper.

2.1. Student Interest

The University of Virginia hosts a Web site about student efforts to create expressive ETDs [KIRS98]. There are a number of students who have been interested in using new publishing approaches, hypertext, multimedia, hypermedia, and large volume storage units (e.g., CD-ROM), to prepare ETDs. Many of these are very creative, are more effective in expressing their results than usual, and so function as the real pioneers who help define the emerging ETD genre [KIRS96].

Since multimedia content types often require a great deal of storage space, one form of the push toward ETDs involves turning in CD-ROM [MANG]. While technically one can use tape or network transfers to move such large volumes of data, CD-ROMs have several advantages:

• with good choice of media and care, they may last 10 years or more;
• many multimedia files (e.g., video) can be played off the CD-ROM, giving a similar effect to that of a book that can be read;
• it is easy to copy from a CD-ROM to other storage devices.

At the University of South Florida, a careful study has been made of the matter of ETDs, helped in part by a number of studetns. There is particular emphasis on issues related to writing and expression. USF is aggressively pursuing mechanisms for accepting and handling ETDs and is looking further into ways to improve their quality and to assist their authors [WEIS].

2.2. Other Related Efforts

Many other groups have been exploring ETDs; for some pointers see [NDLTDe]. One such effort is to apply SGML. In particular, the many years of effort invested in the Text Encoding Initiative should bear fruit when students are working with texts marked up according to TEI guidelines. A pilot exploration of these issues was undertaken at the University of Michigan [ERIC]. Further work at Michigan, and also at University of Virginia, will investigate using the TEI DTD for creating ETDs as well as how well conversions can be make between that DTD and the ETD-ML form developed at Virginia Tech.

Another institution involved in TEI, and with long experience in electronic archives, is Oxford University. Recently, a branch of Oxford has expressed interest in handling ETDs [MCKE]. It is not year clear how that will work or who will avail themselves of that service.

2.3. VT ETD Initiative

While there are many ETD initiatives, as explained above, the most extensive effort has occurred at Virginia Tech. There is a campus Web page on this [NDLTDf] as well as additional information available from the Library [SCP]. The Virginia Tech Graduate School, Library and Computing Center are committed for the long term to make ETDs the norm.

In addition to hardware and software to support ETDs, Virginia Tech also has a rich network infrastructure, including a vBNS (high speed Internet research and education backbone) connection through "Net.Work.Virginia," the statewide ATM network that it runs and which includes educational institutions all over the Commonwealth. Thanks to donations from IBM, one computer runs the IBM Digital Library product and will be used to provide access through that software, while another computer with 4 terabytes of storage is ready to handle even the largest multimedia files.

Virginia Tech's ETD-related information has been organized into four parts:

1. student submission (including policies, checklists, training materials, and automated scripts);
2. the searchable collection managed by the Library using OpenText software;
3. other copies of the searchable collection, also on Library equipment, used for demonstrations of digital library interoperability and to provide additional (experimental) services; and
4. information related to NDLTD (the project and its members - see below).

2.4. NDLTD

To further the cause of ETDs, regionally, Virginia Tech applied for and received funding in 1996 from the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) so that institutions in the Southeast could benefit from creating and sharing ETDs.

To extend this to the national level, Virginia Tech proposed a broader effort, to improve graduate education through a National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, and received funding from the U.S. Department of Education (FIPSE). Then, as international members joined too, the name was changed to the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). Additional support has been provided by may groups, especially Adobe, CNI, CGS, IBM, Microsoft, and OCLC

NDLTD calls for a sustainable, worldwide, collaborative, educational initiative of universities committed to encouraging students to prepare electronic documents and to use digital libraries. We believe that students often learn best by doing, so this competency-oriented program should ensure that the next generation of scholars is prepared more completely for the Information Age. The underlying ideas and history of NDLTD are summarized in [FOX96] and [FOX97a]. The collection of available ETDs can be accessed from [NDLTDa].

Though many have heard about ETDs as a result of extensive news coverage [NDLTDb] some of that is overly sensational and sometimes inaccurate. More accurate information is available in the various publications about the project [NDLTDd].

As mentioned earlier, extensive investigation of ETDs has been undertaken at USF [USF]. This university is one of the members of NDLTD, as is University of Waterloo, which boasts another team that has been studying about ETDs, and which prepared a careful and influential survey of worldwide activities in this area [TUG]. All told there are 26 members at the time of writing this paper, with dozens more likely to join in the next year [NDLTDc].

Even beyond the basic goals of NDLTD, we believe it important for global knowledge sharing to occur, and for there to be more collaboration among researchers [FOX97b]. However, this position is sometimes at odds with other goals of students, faculty, and educational institutions. Thus, after careful deliberation and many discussions, Virginia Tech developed an approval form that must be filled in and signed by students and their committee, part of which indicated what type of access to their ETD should be afforded to others [NDLTDg]. We hope that as time moves forward, wider access will be allowed by students and faculty, once they are assured that there will be no ill effects from releasing their ETD for worldwide use.

One of the key issues for NDLTD is to ensure that ETDs are preserved. At Virginia Tech the Library has committed to handle this, by copying to new media as that becomes available, by keeping multiple backups, and by migrating file formats as needed. This latter chore can be reduced somewhat if open standards are used. Thus, Table 1 indicates what formats are encouraged for files submitted as part of an ETD. Further detail on the VT collection is given in the next section.

Table 1. File Types and Formats

3. VT Collection

If we ignore page image collections like that of UMI, Virginia Tech's ETD collection is the largest. Thus, we explore some aspects of it, beginning with a discussion of statistics.

3.1. Statistics

Table 2 gives access statistics for the collection, based on data covering 1996 and other data covering 1997. It is clear that:

• there has been tremendous growth in access from one year to the next;
• there is 10-100 times as much access to this collection than occurs with regard to TDs on library shelves or even to works held by UMI; and
• accesses are from a large number of different sites.

Table 3 shows that accesses are from many domains. As expected, most accesses are from other educational institutions. However, a substantial number are from "commercial" organizations, possibly from industrial research labs. While it is possible that such accesses are really by people taking classes part-time, who use a computer in their place of work, it is likely that many are involved in corporate R&D.

Table 4 shows that accesses are from many parts of the world. The rows are ordered based on number of accesses, given in descending order. It also should be noted that there were vast increases in numbers from one year to the next. While there are many accesses from countries where English is spoken, many accesses are from countries where English is not as commonplace.

Table 5 shows the most popular works during 1996, and Table 6 shows that for 1997. It should be noted that while most ETDs are about 1 or 2 megabytes in size, the most popular ones in 1996 were somewhat larger, and in 1997 dramatically so.

Table 5. Most Highly Accessed ETDs During 1996

Another interesting shift that occurred in 1997 is the focus on scientific and engineering ETDs. Whereas education was an important topic in 1996, none had that theme in the most popular set for 1997. While Virginia Tech is known for its science and engineering, and has a large number of degrees awarded in these areas, another explanation is probably in order, especially for the staggering number of downloads of the full document (usually coded in PDF, Adobe's Portable Document Format). Possibly, the intense interest in these works is due to the importance of sharing the kind of content found in an ETD.

In particular, these popular works are large, containing many figures. They give a great deal of detail, have long bibliographies, and have extensive literature reviews. We explore more aspects of these works below.

Table 6. Most Highly Accessed ETDs During 1997

To calibrate our counts, it is important to categorize the collection according to type of access allowed. We note in passing that affording such access control is one of the key benefits and advantages of a digital library [GLAD]. In any case, Table 7 shows counts for each of the various access conditions. In discussions below, the "unrestricted access" category, that is the publicly available works, are the basis for all analysis.

Table 8 serves several important purposes. First, it should remind the reader about Table 1,which considered what multimedia formats might be used. Here, though, instead of abstract suggestions, we see what authors really do. Second, Table 8 makes it clear how many authors make use of multimedia. Note that these figures are for separate multimedia files, and do not reflect the use of images that are a part of a PDF page. In analysis planned for later this summer we will work to find also how many ETDs have some multimedia content, and the average number of each media type per ETD/

Table 8. Separate Multimedia Files

Table 9 helps us see the mix of ETDs as compared to the various degrees offered. We see that at Virginia Tech there are fewer doctoral documents prepared than at the masters level. We also see that most documents in the collection are standard TDs.

Table 10 indicates how many ETDs were submitted each year since 1993. Note that starting in 1993, we began to work with actual ETDs, sometimes converting documents from student diskettes. In some cases students asked a few years after graduation to have their TD put up electronically.

Serious numbers only started to arrive in 1996 when we publicized that students could submit electronically. Also, during that year we waived a $20 fee if an electronic submission was made instead of paper, to encourage the process. Starting with the beginning of 1997, all TDs were required to be submitted electronically. While many deplore mandates or requirements in academic settings, it is clear that such an action is much more effective in getting ETDs from students than happens if an option is given.

Now that some basis statistics are given about ETDs, it is time for a more in-depth analysis.

3.2. Case Study

Gail McMillan chose the works listed in Table 11 to be representative of ETDs that made use of new capabilities. From the titles it can be seen that some of the topics might be of wide interest, too.

Table 12 gives more details about the works selected. The second column indicates figures, either found by a table of figures, or by looking through the document and counting. The third and fourth columns give details on the PDF files; it is clear that most only have one such file but there are others that split, often to separate among chapters or between the body and the appendix. Once again it is obvious that these interesting works are large, probably due to the number of figures.

A few works have other content. Oral includes video, while DeVaux uses AuthorWare. Finally, note that while most are technical works, three of the set are from other disciplines. ETDs relating to architecture, in particular, seem to make particular good use of the media.

Finally, we consider particular aspects of the case study works. Readers are encouraged to look at these and others to understand more about the use and potential of ETDs. We take these in order, adding in some high level comments.

• Theodoros David includes bookmarks and thumbnails, as well as color illustrations within the document [DAVI].
• David DeVaux explains about developing a tutorial on AuthorWare, including some figures and screen dumps in the body of the document, and many more in the appendix. He also developed files for students to use to help them generate their own AuthorWare programs, and included them in the package given to his committee chair. For class purposes, there is an extract of the tutorial content, another PDF file of 1.6M. In addition there are two AuthorWare files, 50K and 264K, an AuthorWare library of 215K, three QuickTime files (17K, 17K and 578K) [DEVA].
• Craig Favor turned in a "plain vanilla" ETD, but with separate files (not all are clearly named); in addition he included line graphics, charts, and tables [FAVO].
• Richard Hephner also turned in a "plain vanilla" ETD but with scanned photographs inserted, which are quite dramatic [HEPH].
• Xiangdong Liu, an expert on scanning, has excellent scanned images and other graphics as well as some illustrations of problems possible when scanning improperly [LIU].
• Timur Oral included two QuickTime video clips. The background audio conveys the impression of street noise or business activity. There are lovely images in the document, Turkish rugs, pottery, and tiles [ORAL].
• David Orens uses a more interesting layout than most ETDs. There is nice design and graphics. He provides many Web links, both internal (e.g., glossary of terms) and external (e.g., National Gallery of Art) [OREN].

4. Conclusions and Future Work

Digital libraries can help us share knowledge and culture on a world scale [FOX98]. That sharing can be even richer if linguistic variation is preserved as well, but that presents unique challenges for digital libraries to surmount [BORG97]. These problems are important to solve, so digital libraries can help enrich world culture and understanding.

ETDs may be a key driving force for sharing knowledge and culture. If all TDs are captured electronically, and most are freely shared, there will be tens of thousands of new works each year, many of which will deal with topics like history, sociology, linguistics, religion, and architecture. These will directly help people learn about other cultures, while more technical works will help readers learn about methods and approaches adopted by groups in remote locations. Personally, we have benefitted from the attractiveness of our project in that Professor Jong-Min Bae has come from Korea to spend a sabbatical year that started August 1997.

The discussion above touches on some aspects relating to the new genre called ETD. It is clear that it is here to stay, and will become more commonly used in upcoming years. We will work to document that evolution, and to encourage the improvement of graduate education and the increase in knowledge sharing that can accompany use of ETDs.

5. References

[BORG96] Borgman, C.L.; Bates, M.J.; Cloonan, M.V.; Efthimiadis, E.N.; Gilliland-Swetland, A.; Kafai, Y.; Leazer, G.L.; Maddox, A. (1996). "Social Aspects Of Digital Libraries." Final Report to the National Science Foundation; Computer, Information Science, and Engineering Directorate; Division of Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems; Information Technology and Organizations Program. Award number 95-28808. <http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/DL/>

[BORG97] Christine L. Borgman (1997). "Multi-Media, Multi-Cultural, and Multi-Lingual Digital Libraries: Or How Do We Exchange Data In 400 Languages?" D-Lib Magazine, June 1997. <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june97/06borgman.html>

[DAVI] Theodoros P. David (1997). "Networking Requirements and Solutions for a TV WWW Browser." Dissertation, Virginia Tech Libraries, Blacksburg, VA 24061 <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/public/etd-82497-16476/etd-title.html>

[DEVA] David R. DeVaux (1996). "A Tutorial on Authorware." Master of Science Special Report, Virginia Tech Libraries, Blacksburg, VA 24061 <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/public/etd-18409759651581/etd-title.html>

[ERIC] Janet Erickson (1997). "An SGML/HTML Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Library," Proc. TEI 10, Text Encoding Initiative Tenth Anniversary User Conference, Nov. 1997. <http://www.stg.brown.edu/webs/tei10/tei10.papers/erickson.html>

[FAVO] Craig M. Favor (1997). "Evaluation of a 'Floating' Aerobics Floor." Dissertation, Virginia Tech Libraries, Blacksburg, VA 24061 <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/public/etd-91432539751141/etd-title.html>

[FOX96] Edward A. Fox, John L. Eaton, Gail McMillan, Neill A. Kipp, Laura Weiss, Emilio Arce, and Scott Guyer (1996). "National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Unlock University Resources." D-Lib Magazine, September 1996. <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september96/theses/09fox.html>

[FOX97a] Edward A. Fox, John L. Eaton, Gail McMillan, Neill A. Kipp, Paul Mather, Tim McGonigle, William Schweiker, and Brian DeVane (1997). "Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: An International Effort Unlocking University Resources." D-Lib Magazine, September 1997. <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september97/theses/09fox.html>

[FOX97b] Edward A. Fox, Robert Hall, Neill A. Kipp, John L. Eaton, Gail McMillan, and Paul Mather (1997). "NDLTD: Encouraging International Collaboration in the Academy." DESIDOC Bulletin of Information Technology, September 1997. <http://www.ndltd.org/pubs/dbit.pdf>

[FOX98] Edward A. Fox and Gary Marchionini (1998). "Toward a Worldwide Digital Library. Guest Editors' Introduction to special section (pp. 28-98) on Digital Libraries: Global Scope, Unlimited Access." Commun. of the ACM, Apr. 1998, 41(4): 28-32. <http://purl.lib.vt.edu/dlib/pubs/CACM199804>

[GLAD] Henry M. Gladney (1997). "Safeguarding Digital Library Contents and Users: Document Access Control." D-Lib Magazine, June 1997. <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june97/ibm/06gladney.html>

[GUED] Jean-Claude GuÈdon (1998). "The Virtual Library: An Oxymoron?" NLM and MLA 1998 Leiter Lecture, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, May 1998.

[HEPH] Richard H. Hephner (1997). "'Where Youth and Laughter Go:' Trench Warfare from Petersburg to the Western Front." Dissertation, Virginia Tech Libraries, Blacksburg, VA 24061 <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/public/etd-5946112339731121/etd-title.html>

[KIRS96] Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (1996). "Electronic publishing and doctoral dissertations in the humanities." 1996 Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association, Washington DC; see also a revised and expanded version in Proc. Joint Annual Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, Kingston, Ontario, June 6, 1997. <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ETD/about/etd-mla.html>

[KIRS98] Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (1998). "Electronic theses and dissertations in the humanities: A directory of on-line references and resources." <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ETD/ETD.html>

[LIU] Xiangdong Liu (1996). "Analysis and Reduction of Moire Patterns in Scanned Halftone Pictures." Dissertation, Virginia Tech Libraries, Blacksburg, VA 24061 <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/public/etd-158151259631631/etd-title.html>

[MANG] Katherine S. Mangan (1998). "Universities consider whether new format is appropriate way to present research." Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 1996. Page A 15. <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ETD/about/chronicle.html>

[MCKE] Brian McKenna (1998). "Oxford Academic (OxAc) Electronic publication of academic monographs." <http://www.ool.co.uk/oxac/>

[NDLTDa] NDLTD Team (1998). "ETD Digital Library." <http://www.theses.org/>

[NDLTDb] NDLTD Team (1998). "NDLTD in the News." <http://www.ndltd.org/news/>

[NDLTDc] NDLTD Team (1998). "NDLTD Official Members." <http://www.ndltd.org/members/>

[NDLTDd] NDLTD Team (1998). "NDLTD Papers and Publications." <http://www.ndltd.org/pubs/>

[NDLTDe] NDLTD Team (1998). "NDLTD Related Projects." <http://www.ndltd.org/related/projects.htm>

[NDLTDf] NDLTD Team (1998). "Virginia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation home page." <http://etd.vt.edu/>

[NDLTDg] NDLTD Team (1997). "Virginia Tech Graduate School Electronic Submission Approval Form." <http://etd.vt.edu/submit/approval.htm>

[ORAL] Timur Oral (1997). "Contemporary Turkish Coffeehouse design based on historic traditions." Dissertation, Virginia Tech Libraries, Blacksburg, VA 24061 <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/public/etd-2227102539751141/etd-title.html>

[OREN] David M. Orens (1997). "an end to the other in landscape architecture: poststructural theory and universal design." Dissertation, Virginia Tech Libraries, Blacksburg, VA 24061 <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/public/etd-4220121649751351/etd-title.html>

[SCP] Scholarly Communications Project (1998). "Scholarly Communications Project: Virginia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation home page." <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/>

[TUG] TriUniversity Group (TUG) (1998). "TUG Electronic Thesis Project." <http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/TUG/ETD/>

[UMIa] UMI. (1998). "The Dissertation Abstracts Database." <http://www.umi.com/hp/Support/DServices/products/da.htm>

[UMIb] UMI. (1998). "Dissertation Lore." <http://www.umi.com/hp/Support/DServices/shortcut/lore.htm>

[UMIc] UMI. (1998). "ProQuest Digital Dissertations." <http://wwwlib.umi.com/solutions/2.0.html>>

[UMId] UMI. (1998). "Submitting Your Dissertation or Master's Theses in Electronic Format." <http://www.umi.com/hp/Support/DExplorer/prepare/submit.htm>

[USF] University of South Florida ETD Project (1998). "Electronic Publication of Theses and Dissertations, University of South Florida." <http://www.usf.edu/~writing/etds.html>

[VTRGS] Virginia Tech Research and Graduate Studies (1998). "New Issues in Academe: Scholarship in the Electronic World." <http://www.rgs.vt.edu/resmag/seminars.html>

[WEIS] Christian Weisser, John Baker and Janice R. Walker (1997). "Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Problems and Possibilities." <http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/walker/papers/etds/bibliog.html>

6. Acknowledgments

Many thanks go to the many faculty, students and staff at Virginia Tech and at other institutions working on ETDs, especially John Eaton, Gail McMillan, Neill Kipp, and Paul Mather. The U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education supports NDLTD. Additional in-kind has been provided by many parties including: Adobe, Arbortext, Council of Graduate Schools, Coalition for Networked Information, IBM, OCLC, SOLINET, and SURA.

Copyright © 1998 Edward A. Fox, Gail McMillan and John Eaton