Archives des mots-clés : Electronic theses and dissertations

Documenting Digital Projects: Instituting Guidelines for Digital Dissertations and Theses in the Humanities

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Authors : Roxanne Shirazi, Stephen Zweibel

Dissertations and theses with interactive digital components seldom fit neatly into the institutional format requirements designed for traditional humanities texts. This creates challenges for students, administrators, and librarians who are charged with preparing these works for library deposit.

While disciplinary acceptance of digital dissertations in the humanities may be increasing across institutions, little attention is given to the mechanics of documenting and submitting such projects.

Readers, also, are challenged to find and interpret digital projects that may not be entirely described in the accompanying paper. To address this, the authors examined a set of digital theses and dissertations at their institution to determine how these digital components might fit into traditional manuscript formatting guidelines.

This article introduces the resulting set of local documentation guidelines for digital dissertations and theses aimed at improving access, preservation, and reproducibility.

URL : Documenting Digital Projects: Instituting Guidelines for Digital Dissertations and Theses in the Humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.81.7.1123

From Meow to ROAR: Expanding Open Access Repository Services at the University of Houston Libraries

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Authors : Annie Wu, Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Santi Thompson, Bethany Scott, Anne Washington, Xiping Liu

INTRODUCTION

The rapidly changing scholarly communication ecosystem is placing a growing premium on research data and scholarship that is openly available. It also places a growing pressure on universities and research organizations to expand their publishing infrastructures and related services.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

To embrace the change and meet local demands, University of Houston (UH) Libraries formed a cross-departmental open access implementation team in 2017 to expand our open access repository services to accommodate a broad range of research products beyond electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).

The result of this effort was the Cougar Research Open Access Repositories (Cougar ROAR), a rebranded and expanded portal to the UH Institutional Repository, and the UH Dataverse, which disseminates the full range of scholarly outputs generated at the University of Houston.

This article describes the team’s phased activities, including internal preparation, a campus pilot, rebranding, and a robust outreach program. It also details the team’s specific tasks, such as building the Cougar ROAR portal, developing ROAR policies and guidelines, enhancing institutional repository functionality, conducting campus promotional activities, and piloting and scaling a campus-wide open access program.

NEXT STEPS

Based on the pilot project findings and the resulting recommendations, the team outlined key next steps for sustainability of the UH Libraries’ open access services: continuation of the campus CV service, establishment of campus-wide OA policy, further promotion of Cougar ROAR and assessment of OA programs and services, and investment in long-term storage and preservation of scholarly output in Cougar ROAR.

URL : From Meow to ROAR: Expanding Open Access Repository Services at the University of Houston Libraries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2309

What about ODTs? Are they grey?

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Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Snjezana Cirkovic, Hélène Prost

The term of grey literature is sometimes applied for older material and special collections, especially in the field of digitization projects of scientific heritage.

The following paper will analyse this term of “grey scientific heritage” and, based on empirical and conceptual elements, contribute to a better understanding of grey literature. Special attention will be paid on older theses and dissertations (OTDs), as a main part of scientific heritage especially from universities.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01916964

Dissertation-to-Book Publication Patterns Among a Sample of R1 Institutions

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Authors: Karen Rupp-Serrano, Jen Waller

INTRODUCTION

A common concern about openly available electronic theses and dissertations is that their “openness” will prevent graduate student authors from publishing their work commercially in the future. A handful of studies have explored aspects of this topic; this study reviewed dissertation-to-book publication patterns at Carnegie Classification R1 academic institutions.

METHODS

This study analyzed over 23,000 dissertations from twelve U.S. universities to determine how frequently dissertations were subsequently published as books matching the original dissertation in pagination, chapters, and subject matter.

WorldCat and several other resources were used to make publication determinations.

RESULTS

Across the sample set, a very small percentage of dissertations were published as books that matched the original dissertation on pagination, chapters, and subject matter. The average number of years for dissertations in the study to be published as books was determined for broad subject categories and for select academic disciplines.

Results were compared across public and private institutions, and books that were self-published or published by questionable organizations were identified.

DISCUSSION

Dissertation-to-book trends occur primarily in the social sciences, humanities, and arts. With dissertations for which the author is actively working to publish as a book, the commonly offered 6- to 24-month embargo periods appear sufficient, provided that extensions or renewals continue to be available.

CONCLUSION

This study has implications for librarians providing services to graduate students, faculty advisors, and graduate colleges/schools in regard to dissertation embargo lengths, self-publishing, and what we have termed questionable publishers, as these areas continue to provide opportunities for librarians to educate these stakeholders.

URL : Dissertation-to-Book Publication Patterns Among a Sample of R1 Institutions

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2187

 

Dissertation to Book? A Snapshot of Dissertations Published As Books in 2014 and 2015, Available in Open Access Institutional Repositories

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Authors : Anna Marie Johnson, Tyler Goldberg, Robert Detmering

INTRODUCTION

Graduate students sometimes express consternation about whether the presence of their dissertation in an open access institutional repository (IR) will harm their chances of being able to publish the manuscript as a book. Several studies have addressed the question from different perspectives, but the avenue of examining what had actually been published had not been explored.

METHODS

This study examines books published in 2014 and 2015 that were listed as dissertations in one large book vendor database. A list of books was downloaded and searched in both ProQuest’s Dissertations & Theses Global database and Google to identify a matching dissertation.

RESULTS

Only a small percentage of books published as dissertations were found in ProQuest and then subsequently in IRs. The number of libraries holding book titles with corresponding dissertations in IRs dropped between 2014 and 2015. The lists of publishers who published dissertations as books was very similar between 2014 and 2015 data and included large, commercial publishers.

DISCUSSION

Students should be aware that only a small percentage of the total number of dissertations produced in a year are subsequently published as books, that the time between dissertation and book publication is substantial, and that some subject areas are more likely to be published than others.

CONCLUSION

These findings provide nuance to the discussions of dissertations in open access repositories and a starting point to monitor trends in this area. They should also provide librarians who are providing supplementary guidance to graduate students with information about the publishing landscape.

URL : Dissertation to Book? A Snapshot of Dissertations Published As Books in 2014 and 2015, Available in Open Access Institutional Repositories

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2177

Making Visualization Work for Institutional Repositories: Information Visualization as a means to browse electronic theses and dissertations

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Authors : Leila Belle Sterman, Susan Borda

INTRODUCTION

An attractive repository with clear, well-structured and accessible content can be a powerful recruitment and publicity tool for administrators, fundraisers, and others trying to bolster support for repositories.

Digitizing ETDs is a lengthy and often arduous process. Once that process is completed, it is often a victory that suffices. As a result, collections frequently receive no further treatment. We demonstrate the benefits of visualizing repository content.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

The goal of the project was to create an interactive visualization to make our newly digitized theses and dissertations more discoverable.

By leveraging the institutional organization of College, Department and Year of Graduation, we visualized data to help users understand ETD content as a whole and find specific items more easily.

BUILDING THE VISUALIZATION

The process begins with data cleanup involving extracting and normalizing repository metadata, then the data is processed and the Data-Driven Documents (D3) JavaScript library is used to generate the actual visualization.

Benefits of Visualizations to Users: The visualization allows for the sort of happenstance discovery of materials that are celebrated about shelf browsing and a way to compare the productivity of each college and department at our university. It also illustrates our institution’s changes in emphasis over time.

NEXT STEPS

Visualizations have vast potential for creating engaging user interfaces for digital library content. We would like to explore how people are using the visualization as we move forward with this process to visualize multiple collections.

URL : Making Visualization Work for Institutional Repositories: Information Visualization as a means to browse electronic theses and dissertations

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2140

Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual

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Authors : Jill Cirasella, Polly Thistlethwaite

The process of completing a dissertation is stressful—deadlines are scary, editing is hard, formatting is tricky, and defending is terrifying. (And, of course, postgraduate employment is often uncertain.)

Now that dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, students must perform yet another anxiety-inducing task: deciding whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA) or, at universities that require OA, coming to terms with openness.

For some students, mostly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, who hope to transform their dissertations into books, OA has become a bogeyman, a supposed saboteur of book contracts and destroyer of careers.

This chapter examines the various access-related anxieties that plague graduate students. It is a kind of diagnostic and statistical manual of dissertation anxieties—a “Dissertation Anxiety Manual,” if you will—describing anxieties surrounding book contracts, book sales, plagiarism, juvenilia, the ambiguity of the term online, and changes in scholarly research and production.

URL : http://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/286/