The fruits of research from the formal research programmes of conventional universities and academic research institutions in India were under-utilized as the access to theses, dissertations and research reports were very limited to the next generation researchers and scholars. Modern information and communication technology (ICT) acts as an effective intervener for paradigm shifting from closed access theses and dissertations to open access electronic theses and dissertations (ETD). Now, the researchers in national institutions and universities in India have greater access to research literature, due to subscription to many e-journals and scholarly databases in most subject areas. But, the access to thesis and dissertation literature is very limited due to lack of national databases of theses and dissertations, both in bibliographic and full-text formats. Recently, India's University Grants Commission enacted â UGC (Submission of Metadata and Full-text of Doctoral Theses in Electronic Format) Regulations, 2005â to strengthen national capability of producing electronic theses and dissertations, and, to maintain university-level and national level databases of theses and dissertations. Some elite research institutions, such as Indian Institute of Science, have already started providing access to ETDs through open access archives. Some other institutions have taken initiatives to provide access to ETDs only through intranet (within the campus). The Vidyanidhi, INDEST Consortium, CSIR and INFLIBNET Centre are working towards implementation of open access ETD and/or bibliographic databases of theses and dissertations, but they also have some limitations. National policies on open access to ETD and other research literature, particularly the public funded ones, are yet to be ready. In India, some advocacy and pressure groups also exist that support open access to scholarly literature. Present paper explores the policy frameworks, strategic dimensions and analyses SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) of existing ETD initiatives in India.

This is a presentation (15 slides) at the 2005 ASIS&T Annual Meeting session on Collaboration in Digital Libraries: Luminous Ideas from Health Informatics, Academic Libraries, and Historical Archives.

This paper was presented as invited plenary keynote address. / This article surveys the cultural record in the digital environments and the current efforts to capture this record and circulate it as knowledge, documents, and collections in memory institutions, and provide a basis for the creation of new knowledge. The goals of digital preservation are interpreted in the light of recent arguments about the role of the humanities in providing access to the complete human experience, of the changing idea of the archive representing that experience, and of the roles of memory institutions in supporting the humanities project. Two sets of current preservation activities are identified and surveyed - web archiving (of national web spaces, web spheres) and curated collections of primary sources from the history web. The emerging forms of interpretive and point-of-view history, invented archives, and digital libraries capturing local history, everyday experience and community memory illustrate how digital media can support interpretive and multi-perspective historiography.

Electronic journals unfold their most valuable features when they are inter-linked with other documents, archives and databases. These electronic journals need an archiving system that is based on a global concept. Archiving ensures "continued access indefinitely into the future of records stored in digital electronic form". Archiving system has to be flexible to adopt the new technological generation. The rapid pace at which technology becomes obsolete makes archiving an extremely expensive undertaking. The librarians are more concerned about the archiving of the electronic journals themselves, or getting access to the archives established by the publishers or the aggregators. This paper focuses on the issues related to the archiving of electronic journals in Physics and Astronomy by the publishers, aggregators and the consortia.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2006 / Includes bibliographical references (p. 184-191). Also available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

The amount of digital content produced at academic research institutions is large, and libraries and archives at these institutions have a responsibility to bring this digital material under curatorial control in order to manage and preserve it over time. But this is a daunting task with few proven models, requiring new technology, policies, procedures, core staff competencies, and cost models. The MIT Libraries are working with the DSpace(TM) open-source digital repository platform to explore the problem of capturing research and teaching material in any digital format and preserving it over time. By collaborating on this problem with other research institutions using the DSpace platform in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and other parts of the world, as well as with other important efforts in the digital preservation arena, we are beginning to see ways of managing arbitrary digital content that might make digital preservation an achievable goal. / Page image PDF

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Digital libraries with multimedia geographic content present special challenges and opportunities in today's networked information environment. One of the most challenging research issues for geospatial collections is to develop techniques to support fuzzy, concept-based, geographic information retrieval. Based on an artificial intelligence approach, this project presents a Geospatial Knowledge Representation System (GKRS) prototype that integrates multiple knowledge sources (textual, image, and numerical) to support concept-based geographic information retrieval. Based on semantic network and neural network representations, GKRS loosely couples different knowledge sources and adopts spreading activation algorithms for concept-based knowledge inferencing. Both textual analysis and image processing techniques have been employed to create textual and visual geographical knowledge structures. This paper suggests a framework for developing a complete GKRS-based system and describes in detail the prototype system that has been developed so far.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2010. / "Graduate Program in Communication, Information and Library Studies." Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-207).

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Identified as an important management concept five years ago (Gamer 1999), knowledge management (KM) aims to enable organizations to capture, organize, and access their intellectual assets. This paper proposes a prototype system that applies a knowledge management approach to support concept-based multimedia information retrieval by integrating various information analysis and image processing techniques. The proposed system uses geographical information as its testbed and aims to provide flexibility to users in terms of specifying their information needs and to facilitate parallel extraction ofinformation in different formats (i.e., text, image). Our testbed selection is based not only on the fact that geographical information has become an important resource supporting organization decision making, but also on the diversity of its information media and the fuzziness of geo-spatial queries. We hope that the proposed system will improve the accessibility of geographical information in different media and provide an example of integrating various information and multimedia techniques to support concept-based cross-media information retrieval.