Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, in the Department of Communication Science, University of Zululand, 2006. / Ubiquitous access to digital networks and the Internet have revolutionised the way multimedia information is being stored, accessed and disseminated by information services. New technologies have played an important role in redefining preferred information and communication models to facilitate the efficient dissemination and retrieval of information. So has the emergence of electronic publishing and the global trend towards accessing and sharing digital content on the World Wide Web (WWW) led to a greater electronic dissemination of postgraduate academic Theses and Dissertations (TDs). These electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) provide a reservoir of knowledge that can easily be accessed by the international research community and diffused across all fields of research. Some 73 per cent of the study’s e-survey participants found obtaining research material online more efficient than using paperbound sources; 51 per cent were familiar with the concept of ETDs; 87 per cent agreed that adding TDs to an online database would improve the accessibility and use of this research; 65 per cent indicated that they would not have any reservations with adding their TD to an online database; and 48 per cent felt that ETDs should be introduced into their tertiary institutions.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / PUC-Rio – Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro has a repository named the Maxwelll System (http://www.maxwell.lambda.ele.puc-rio.br/). ETDs and journals are stored and made available from this repository, as well as senior projects, learning objects, articles, etc. ETDs became mandatory as of August 1, 2002 and the first journal was published in June 2003. Two areas of the Center for Humanities and Theology – Education and Languages – have traditional and well known graduate programs; they are also the ones that publish the highest numbers of online journals (3 each). The Maxwell System is an OAI-PMH data provider and PUC-Rio’s ETDs have their metadata harvested by BDTD, the Brazilian National Consortium, NDLTD, Biblioteca Universia, etc. All journals are indexed on DOAJ. Both their ETDs and journals have significant numbers of accesses from Brazil and from abroad. This work addresses a comparison between the patterns of accesses between ETDs and journals in those areas. It focuses patterns for ETDs and journals in the same area, ETDs in the two areas, and journals in the two areas. All analysis takes into account accesses from: (1) Brazil; (2) Portuguese speaking countries; (3) Spanish speaking countries; and (4) all other countries. The numbers to be compared are either computed in percentages or are normalized since the sizes of the collections are quite different. Since the newest journal in the two areas began being published in March 2010, this paper focuses accesses from this month/year on. This means that data are available for over two years. Accesses to ETDs have already been examined and presented and published at previous ETD symposia.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / One of the reasons that we know so little of ancient life is because much of written history of those times has been lost. We can only speculate what really happened. If only we had not lost all the treasures…If only we had preserved that knowledge somewhere else or in some other medium, then probably mankind need not have to start all over again re-discovering knowledge. The loss of knowledge is due to three reasons - Disasters, Media Deterioration, and Alternative Formats & Obsolete Technology A clear idea about what could be lost will only lead us to take precautionary steps or to lessen the damage. Within a library and information service (LIS), the most likely disasters are fire or flood, but those caused by wind, earthquakes and other natural phenomena can also happen. Acts of sabotage or terrorism may occur which can destroy, or seriously disrupt the LIS. And with more and more information being held in electronic format, computer disasters, whether caused by system failure or unauthorized access and hacking into files, are becoming more common. Information is necessarily recorded on some kind of medium. All media deteriorate over time, at different rates and for different reasons. When information is provided in alternative formats – for example microforms or digitized form - equipment for using them must not only be provided, but also kept maintained in good working condition. Preserving long-term access to digital information resources is one of the key challenges facing libraries and information centers today. The paper iterates what steps have been taken by Physical Research Laboratory, Library to overcome this challenge.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / A mandate for ETD deposit at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) was first made in 2001. Retrospective conversion projects with author consent, and assumed consent, finished in 2011, producing an ETD collection, 20,000 strong, online in open access, making HKU first in Asia with all of its thesis collection online, and perhaps the single institution in the world with the largest such collection. In 2011 these ETDs were merged into the HKU IR, The HKU Scholars Hub. Usage statistics of the Hub increased dramatically. The January 2012 Webometric rankings of world repositories showed the Hub climbing 114 places to number 50. In the race to grab stakeholder attention, the addition of ETDs to the Hub is a win / win situation. The Hub shows records for publications, grant projects, author profiles, organizations, all interlinked to each other, showing all aspects of research at HKU [use idea of CRIS?]. Professoriate profiles in the Hub show a list of their supervised research students, and links to their finished fulltext theses, also in the Hub. These links are likewise reciprocated for thesis supervisors in the thesis records. All HKU theses now carry a DOI which increases discovery, and allows import of CrossRef citation data. Rates of download of HKU ETDs have doubled almost every year since 2001. All indications lead to the conclusion that having all facets of research in one repository, add value to each other, and increase rates of discovery and re-use. This then further brings increases in invitations for collaborative research, employment, speaking engagements.., with a concomitant increase of the hosting institution.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / actively supports open access to research literature for all researchers worldwide. The repository for electronic theses and dissertations is called UPeTD and is managed by the Open Scholarship office. More full-time PhD students have enrolled at UP – many of them from African countries or disadvantaged groups within South Africa. Our student body is a diverse group – in the graduate group almost 50% come from other countries in Africa. UPeTD has been in operation for more than a decade. During this time the process has not really changed, but it has undergone staff and management changes. Seeing that the campus is in constant flux with new supervisors arriving and older ones retiring, a re-evaluation of the service, its process, access options and copyright seems relevant at this time. Methods: All UP supervisors were requested to complete a questionnaire. The purpose of the questionnaire was to evaluate the adoption of the electronic submission of theses and dissertations to the UPeTD database; investigate and analyse the current process; gain insight into supervisors’ attitudes towards the UPeTD repository. Objectives of the questionnaire were to determine the usefulness of UPeTD as a repository; establish the benefits for UPeTD users; measure policy knowledge and compliance; determine the most popular communication channel with our clients; and establish the current knowledge and awareness level of the supervisors. Conclusions: In this paper the quantitative and qualitative results of the study will be shared. We will also share key aspects of our management of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and our improved knowledge of the use and usefulness of our institutional repository and our choices of open access software. Recommendations and future improvements, informed by the data, will be discussed.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / This presentation will cover the specifications of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) – a significant movement gaining momentum worldwide – and examine the implications BOAI would have on ETD publishing. The vision of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is the “completely free and unrestricted access” to scholarly literature “by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.” Building on earlier OA declarations signed in Bethesda and Berlin, BOAI reflects the principle that open access publishing “will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.” While BOAI has been initiated to address new forms of journal publishing, “it could be extended quite naturally to all the writings for which authors do not expect payment... These include theses and dissertations.” (Budapest Open Access Initiative:Frequently Asked Questions, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm) As unique works intended to enter the stream of scholarship, ETD’s are a natural candidate for OA publishing. But are the requirements of Budapest suitable for the ETD community? For example, the requirement for distribution under a CC-BY license means that an ETD could be redistributed by any interested party, whether for free or for profit, an objectionable outcome for some authors and institutions. All BOIA implications for ETD publishing will be examined in this presentation.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain valuable scholarly information that can be of immense value to the scholarly community. Millions of ETDs are now publicly available online, often through one of many digital libraries. However, since a majority of these digital libraries are institutional repositories with the objective being content archiving, they often lack end-user services needed to make this valuable data useful for the scholarly community. To effectively utilize such data to address the information needs of users, digital libraries should support various end-user services such as document search and browsing, document recommendation, as well as services to make navigation of long PDF documents easier. In recent years, with advances in the field of machine learning for text data, several techniques have been proposed to support such end-user services. However, limited research has been conducted towards integrating such techniques with digital libraries. This research is aimed at building tools and techniques for discovering and accessing the knowledge buried in ETDs, as well as to support end-user services for digital libraries, such as document browsing and long document navigation. First, we review several machine learning models that can be used to support such services. Next, to support a comprehensive evaluation of different models, as well as to train models that are tailored to the ETD data, we introduce several new datasets from the ETD domain. To minimize the resources required to develop high quality training datasets required for supervised training, a novel AI-aided annotation method is also discussed. Finally, we propose techniques and frameworks to support the various digital library services such as search, browsing, and recommendation. The key contributions of this research are as follows: - A system to help with parsing long scholarly documents such as ETDs by means of object-detection methods trained to extract digital objects from long documents. The parsed documents can be used for further downstream tasks such as long document navigation, figure and/or table search, etc. - Datasets to support supervised training of object detection models on scholarly documents of multiple types, such as born-digital and scanned. In addition to manually annotated datasets, a framework (along with the resulting dataset) for AI-aided annotation also is proposed. - A web-based system for information extraction from long PDF theses and dissertations, into a structured format such as XML, aimed at making scholarly literature more accessible to users with disabilities. - A topic-modeling based framework to support exploration tasks such as searching and/or browsing documents (and document portions, e.g., chapters) by topic, document recommendation, topic recommendation, and describing temporal topic trends. / Doctor of Philosophy / Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain valuable scholarly information that can be of immense value to the research community. Millions of ETDs are now publicly available online, often through one of many online digital libraries. However, since a majority of these digital libraries are institutional repositories with the objective being content archiving, they often lack end-user services needed to make this valuable data useful for the scholarly community. To effectively utilize such data to address the information needs of users, digital libraries should support various end-user services such as document search and browsing, document recommendation, as well as services to make navigation of long PDF documents easier and accessible. Several advances in the field of machine learning for text data in recent years have led to the development of techniques that can serve as the backbone of such end-user services. However, limited research has been conducted towards integrating such techniques with digital libraries. This research is aimed at building tools and techniques for discovering and accessing the knowledge buried in ETDs, by parsing the information contained in the long PDF documents that make up ETDs, into a more compute-friendly format. This would enable researchers and developers to build end-user services for digital libraries. We also propose a framework to support document browsing and long document navigation, which are some of the important end-user services required in digital libraries.

The "digital library" (DL) is a communication technology that has the potential to improve communication by removing temporal and geographic barriers and by introducing interactivity. This research focused on the adoption of digital libraries for electronic theses and dissertations (ETD-DL) at universities worldwide. ETD-DLs provide a means for universities to learn about implementing digital libraries in a networked environment.This research used diffusion of innovation theory to explore what has influenced ETD-DL adoption among Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) member universities. Communication channels were categorized as being either interpersonal or mediated. The perceived importance of these channels was assessed both within and between organizations. Although ETD-DL adoption is an organizational level decision it has implications for both the university and members of the university community. In some cases, these outcomes may be in conflict; for example, what is best for the organization may result in complications for an individual. Therefore the perceived importance of two innovation attributes, relative advantage and compatibility, were examined at both the collective and individual level.This study employed a web-based survey to collect data from the 133 universities in 26 countries that were NDLTD members in December 2002. Respondents were members of the university's "ETD Committee" and represented academic administrators, faculty, librarians, and computer systemsspecialists. Surveys were received from 95 respondents representing 65 universities in 14 countries. Twenty-one of these universities were outside the United States. Universities were from countries with a wide range of economic development.Results provide insights into university attitudes towards a technological innovation for knowledge dissemination. For example, results suggest that interpersonal channels of communication are more important than mediated channels within the organization. Additionally, interpersonal channels are more important for communication within the organization than between organizations. However, mediated channels of communication are more important for those universities that have decided to adopt the ETD-DL but have not yet implemented the union catalog or self-archiving options. There were also significant differences in the importance attributed to these channels by individuals in different jobs. The results also suggest strategies that could encourage development of digital libraries within a social system.

Conferencia realizado del 12 al 14 de setiembre en Lima, Peru del 2012 en el marco del 15º Simposio Internacional de Tesis y Disertaciones Electrónicas (ETD 2012). Evento aupiciado por la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM) y la Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). / In the age of Information Technology it is very important to keep a pace with the rapid changes that has been taking place all over the world. Institutional repository play a vital role in dissemination of intellectual output of the organization hence it is essential to all the organization to develop and digitize their collection and scholarly communication. Keeping in view the technological changes and importance of creating digital repository of electronic theses, the proposal has been prepared for creation of institutional repository of electronic theses of social-sciences of Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University , Nagpur . This proposal is submitted to Indian Council of Social-Science Research, (ICSSR) New Delhi and has been approved recently, now it is in execution stage. The proposal, constraints and measures for Institutional Repository have been also discussed in detail.

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are an evolving genre of graduate student research that is gaining widespread acceptance among universities in the international community. ETDs are also beginning to diffuse slowly among American universities; however, a number of issues continue to work against more rapid adoption among intitutions in the United States. This dissertation examines ETDs as an evolving electronic research genre by (1) historicizing the situated development of its predecessor, the traditional print dissertation, in nineteenth century German and American Universities; (2) reporting on the current state of the Networked Digital Library of Electronic Theses and Dissertations, an initiative of Virginia Polytechnic University; (3) analyzing ETDs as a technological innovation undergoing the diffusion process according to Emmet Roger's Diffusion of Innovation Theory; and (4) presenting the results of an ETD pilot project case study carried out at the University of South Florida.