Maine Perspective Front Page
UMaine Moving to Electronic Theses and Dissertations
For the past year, Fogler Library and the Graduate School have provided University of Maine graduate students with the opportunity to convert their theses and dissertations to digital format and make them accessible through the Web. Beginning this fall, two departments will make the electronic format mandatory.
The Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering and the Computer Science Department are requiring their graduate students to submit theses and dissertations electronically. Other departments are considering implementing similar requirements. The digitized publications will be accessible through Fogler Library's Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) database, and linked to a national digital library of theses and dissertations, accessible via the Internet.
The University of Maine's ETD project is the first in the state, and is part of the ongoing leadership Fogler Library provides in information technology. It also advances the graduate education program that the Graduate School is advocating - one that will move students and their research publications into the digital age.
"Encouraging graduate students to make use of new technologies is complementary to the advanced, cutting-edge training that takes place at the graduate level," says Graduate School Director Scott Delcourt. "It also is an advantage for students to provide wider access to their work.
"This is another way to increase awareness of the excellent research and scholarship done by graduate students at the University of Maine."
The UMaine ETD program is one of 60 universities and colleges that make up the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) that was founded at Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was one of the first institutions to require graduate students to submit dissertations and theses electronically. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education, it is creating a national digital library of theses and dissertations.
NDLTD is an initiative to improve graduate education, increase sharing of knowledge, help universities build their information infrastructure, and extend the value of digital libraries. Its goals are to:
- Improve graduate education by allowing students to produce electronic documents, use digital libraries, and understand issues in publishing;
- Increase the availability of student research for scholars and to preserve it electronically;
- Lower the cost of submitting and handling theses and dissertations;
- Empower students to convey a richer message through the use of multimedia and hypermedia technologies, including sound, simulation, graphics and video;
- Empower universities to unlock their information resources;
- Advance digital library technology.
"The national initiative at Virginia Tech seeks to improve graduate education by teaching students about electronic formats, publishing and digital libraries, and by giving them the support they need to create new kinds of knowledge with new kinds of media," says Marilyn Lutz, Fogler's assistant director for information systems. "Fogler Library is evolving digital collections, and this program is one way to advance the electronic workflow of academia and contribute to the digital collections."
Last May, Lutz was the UMaine representative at an ETD Workshop at Virginia Tech. As part of NDLTD, representatives of participating colleges and universities are addressing such issues as a uniform electronic format for dissertations and theses; standards for preservation archiving; copyright management; training programs; and publishing guidelines. Principal concerns raised by the academic administrators and faculty attending the meeting were vulnerability for information theft (plagiarism) and issues relating to journal publication rights and patents. Participants in the NDLTD are also interested in developing a federated search system that links national and international ETD databases.
Institutions just starting the ETD process begin by developing a user-friendly means of converting theses and dissertations from print to electronic form. For UMaine's pilot project, students submit ETDs on floppy disk, and library staff convert the file(s) to PDF (Portable Document Format), which allows the electronic document to maintain its original format or look. The library also creates a record in the ETD database, and links the full-text file to the record. In future, the library will be developing technical support and web pages that will aid students in participating more fully in, and learning from, the digital publication process.
A number of the institutions involved in NDLTD already mandate electronic filing and have technologically advanced their overall dissertation and thesis process - from students' electronic submissions to validation, approval and grading. Most universities involved in electronic publishing continue to require printed copies.
UMaine's Electronic Theses and Dissertations pilot database,
coordinated by Reference Librarian Deb Rollins, who chairs the library's ETD Committee, resides on a Fogler digital library server. UMaine ETDs were first accepted as optional forms of theses and dissertations in spring 1998.
You can connect to the ETD database from the Fogler Library web (http://libraries.maine.edu/umaine), the Graduate School web (http://www.umaine.edu/graduate), through Mariner (http://libraries.maine.edu/) or directly: http://libraries.maine.edu/umaine/theses/.
The database consists of abstracts of theses and dissertations that can be searched by keyword, or browsed by title, author, department or date, and are linked to full text documents. Public access to the full text of theses and dissertations is restricted to campus-based computers. URSUS catalog records for individual theses and dissertations in the ETD database link directly to the ETD Website for full-text access.
Special Collections is the home of the hard copies of UMaine dissertations and many theses, as well as a number of books published subsequently by graduate alumni. UMaine granted its first master's degree in 1881, its first Ph.D. in 1960 in chemistry, and its first Ed.D. in 1969. However, the archive of student theses and dissertation research, including some of the earliest required for bachelor's degrees, dates to 1873.
For years, UMaine doctoral dissertations have been submitted to University Microfilm International (UMI), now owned by Bell and Howell. For more than a century, UMI has been the national publisher of dissertations and theses. Today, the dissertation abstracts database contains more than 1.4 million entries. The database represents the work of authors from more than 1,000 North American graduate schools and European universities.
Approximately 55,000 new dissertations and 7,000 new theses are added to the database each year. The database includes citations for materials ranging from the first U.S. dissertation, accepted in 1861, to those accepted as recently as last semester; those published from 1980 forward also include 350-word abstracts, written by the author. Citations for master's theses from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts.
Of the 1.4 million titles listed, more than a million are in full text. Dissertations and theses are for sale in a choice of formats: unbound paper, softbound paper, hardbound paper, microfilm, and microfiche.
The advantage of the networked ETD databases over the long-standing UMI system is in cost and access, particularly for master's students. UMaine master's theses are not sent to UMI but are housed in Special Collections.
Providing digital access to this collection is one of Fogler's digital library initiatives that seeks to broaden access to campus collections by digitization. Providing digital access to this collection gives UMaine national recognition for the work done by students and faculty, and offers researchers global access.
In the coming year, the next steps for the UMaine ETD program include: developing a student training program and library technical support team; retrospective conversion of selected theses and dissertations (housed in Special Collections) to digital format; and evolving further the idea of a mandatory ETD requirement with the faculty.
The process begins with faculty in departments like Spatial Information Science and Engineering and Computer Science who endorse the ETD concept and program.
"This program needs the support of the faculty in order to grow," says Lutz, "and that's the work that's just beginning."