Archives
Electronic Highways
Web assists in preparation of theses and dissertations
ProQuest Digital Dissertations http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/gateway provides access to more than 1.6 million entries or abstracts featuring information about doctoral dissertations and master's theses. Authors from more than 1,000 graduate schools and universities are represented in this database, which, because of licensing restrictions, is available only to those patrons affiliated with UB. Much like its print counterpart, Digital Abstracts, Digital Dissertations includes "bibliographic citations for materials ranging from the first U.S. dissertation, accepted in 1861, to those accepted as recently as last semester." Unlike the print version, however, this database provides users with access to more than 100,000 dissertations in full text.
The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) Initiative http://www.ndltd.org/ is a current thesis/dissertation-related project. This open federation of more than 130 member universities and supporting organizations is providing online access to their students' electronic theses and dissertations. Among the objectives of the NDLTD initiative are to "improve graduate education by allowing students to produce electronic documents, use digital libraries and understand issues in publishing" in order "to increase the availability of student research for scholars and to preserve it electronically," as well as to "empower universities to unlock their information resources."
NDLTD participants presently include Virginia Tech (a pioneer in developing this initiative), The Johns Hopkins University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as international participants like Uppsala University (Sweden), Universidad de las Amèricas Puebla (Mexico), Gyeongsang National University, Chinju (Korea), and Rhodes University (South Africa). For a complete list of participants, see http://tennessee.cc.vt.edu/~lming/cgi-bin/ODL/nm-ui/members/index.htm. Many of these participating institutions, in addition to providing electronic access to the graduate work of their students, also require that this work be submitted in electronic format.
The NDLTD Web site allows users to search across numerous participating sites for theses and dissertations on a specific topic. Researchers also may limit their searching and browsing to specific institutions. Note that in some instances, full-text access to documents is not yet available because of copyright or institutional access restrictions. However, the number of full-text titles that can be accessed and downloaded is increasing.
Still under development on the NDLTD site is the Electronic Thesis/Dissertation OAI Union Catalog, http://rocky.dlib.vt.edu/~etdunion/search.htmll, a database built by the harvesting of metadata from open archives of electronic theses and dissertations. At present, a search on the term "bioinformatics" will result in a listing of the topic-related EDTs available from the participating institutions. Links within the results list will take users directly to the title through the sponsoring institution's database. Although the OAI Union Catalog presently has a limited number of participants, the implications are that this meld of NDLTD and the Open Archives Initiative will be expanded to the whole of NDLTD participants. As the number of participants increases, the OAI Union Catalog and NDLTD certainly will become an effective tool for researchers looking for the most current information in their fields.
—Brenda Battleson and Austin Booth, University Libraries