Poster Session: Examining acces by country and language

EXAMINING ACCESSES BY COUNTRY AND LANGUAGE

Ana M B Pavani, Ana C E Mazzeto

PUC-Rio is a BDTD member institution and its collection has over 5K ETDs. The university offers graduate programs in Humanities, Social Sciences and Science & Technology. Though the ETD program started in March 2000, access logs to ETDs have been saved only since June 2004.

The authors decided to examine the logs to try to understand the importance of the ETD collection as a reference to speakers of the two languages. This analysis has been yielding interesting results concerning accesses from:

–* Spanish speaking countries – Latin American countries and Spain;

– * Portuguese speaking countries – Portugal and former Portuguese colonies.

This paper addresses a mapping of the accesses by country, language and region, always considering the country population and, when available, its educational level. The numbers are also compared (as percentages) to total international accesses.

ETD Veterans panel- Back to the future

A panel of veterans launched into some of the hurdles that the ETD movement has confronted in the last decade.

Tim Brace, the moderator and recipient of a 2010 NDLTD leadership award, started the discussion by reading the main program elements from the 2001 ETD conference and asking if anything of the overall interest areas and concerns have changed.

Thomas Dowling shared his geographic proximity with ACS and OCLC and the ability of librarians to change OCLC restrictive policies through banding together for advocacy. Gail McMillan reminded everyone that at that early conference a major publisher, when asked, revealed their acceptance, not opposition, to ETD repositories. Ed Fox emphasized overcoming fears through unity, seeking partnerships, and changing relationship with colleagues, and building a culture of confidence and strength.

The discussion moved to embargoes, and Terry Kahn from the UT Graduate School shared a recent experience with a log-term embargo request and the need to counsel the student about the power of open scholarship. Terry said emphatically that we are on a mission, and that the system of required pre-thesis professional articles is a distracting and incorrect trend that we can advocate against. John Hagen talked about the restrictions imposed by national security concerns that remain unresolved.

Electronic Poster: State of ETDs in Pakistan

State of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in Pakistan: A case study of the Higher Commission of Pakistan (HEC) Depository

Maqsood Ahmad Shaheen, Muhammad Javed Iqbal

The study reviews the existing literature and projects on ETDs in Pakistan. The survey method aims to bring about the present state of ETDs in university libraries in Pakistan, assess the user as well as library staff expertise on these ETDs and the skills required by the librarians to cater user needs.

Poster: Opening the Corral Gate To Collaboration

Opening the Corral Gate To Collaboration, Open Access and Electronic Theses

Janice Cox

This poster presentation will describe the collaborations, electronic theses, institutional repository, and access experience of the Indiana University School of Dentistry Library. Indiana University School of Dentistry’s digitized ETD submissions began in 2009. The IUSDL has been committed to investigating transformative services that not only support the teaching, research, patient care and community outreach activities of the school’s faculty, staff, and students but introduce service flexibility and user empowerment. IUPUI ScholarWorks, the campus’s IR, provided an opportunity to transform an existing service where dissemination and access of graduate student research was corralled by its original design and operational procedures.

Poster Session: ETDs in the Lone Star State

The State of ETDs in the Lone Star State: A Survey of Thesis and Dissertation Granting Institutions in Texas Stephanie A Larrison, Ginger Dickens

Objective: To provide a point of reference on the status of ETDs at Texas institutions and to guide program planning for the newly formed Texas Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (TxETDA).

Methods: Surveyed library and graduate school staff at 52 thesis or dissertation granting institutions in Texas during November 2009 via an online survey.

Plenary Session: James Crawford, Engineering Director for Google Books

Google has big ideas. Books as a corpus of human knowledge. All books- buy anywhere, read anywhere, sell electronic books from kiosks in every public library. According to James, talented engineers get 20% of their time off to create things. I guess we can substitute the word thesis for book, though he did not say this.

USETDA survey to build US ETD collaboration

The USETDA would like your input. Please visit http://tinyurl.com/242275u and complete their brief questionnaire. USETDA wants to encourage the development of state-wide ETD associations, support ETD professionals in their work, and develop a clearinghouse of ETD information to better inform mulitiple audiences on ETD issues and initiatives.