1. Library Services and dissertation dissemination at Fielding Graduate Institute at present

1.1 Fielding Library Services

Because it would serve little purpose in serving a clientele distributed across the globe (though heavily concentrated in North America), Fielding has never had a physical library, aside from the collection of original printed dissertations of its graduates. All information resources that are provided to students, faculty and staff are now online^<1>, in the form of institutional subscriptions to full-text databases, eBooks, e-journals, and, last not least, ProQuest‘s dissertation databases Digital Dissertations with full text (http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/) and Current Research @ Fielding Graduate Institute (http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/fielding/main), both of which contain full-text dissertations in PDF format going back to 1997. The latter database only contains Fielding dissertations, and is in effect a small subset of the former.

Figure 1: Screen snapshot of Current Research @ Fielding Graduate Institute database

1.2 Dissertation Dissemination

Like many North American institutions of higher education, Fielding submits its graduates‘ dissertations^<2> to UMI (now part of ProQuest Information and Learning). Fielding has not joined the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) movement so far, in large part because of concerns regarding creation of „proper“ electronic theses and the concomitant support issues, which the author found affirmed during the ETD 2000 conference:

• A considerable proportion of the student body - all in programs in the social/behavioral sciences, none in technical fields such as engineering - is not very comfortable with the use of personal computing tools beyond basic word processing skills.
• In the distributed education environment, these students cannot easily come to a computer lab to be assisted in the creation of „structurally sound“ documents, and the support requirements to do this remotely, given limited resources, appear daunting.

There is, however, a desire to join the NDLTD movement in principle, in order to make Fielding‘s graduates‘ dissertation available to readers worldwide, including those who cannot or do not want to purchase them via UMI's Dissertation Express service (http://tls.il.proquest.com/hp/Products/DisExpress.html) and whose institutions cannot afford access to ProQuest Digital Dissertations with full text.^<3> This desire would seem consistent with Fielding‘s institutional vision (http://www.fielding.edu/about/mission.htm), which includes „a commitment to social justice and change.“

Figure 2: ProQuest Digital Dissertations with full text database

Footnotes:
<1>	To aid students, faculty and staff in obtaining journal articles etc. that are not available online, Fielding has made an arrangement for subsidized document delivery to them with MITS (Michigan Information Transfer Source), a non-profit, cost-recovery, fee-based information service that is part of the University of Michigan Library system. More about Fielding‘s Library Services can be found at http://www.fielding.edu/about/library.htm.
<2>	With plans to also do that for Master‘s Theses in the near future.
<3>	As of early May 2003, Fielding unfortunately no longer allows for the borrowing of dissertations via Interlibrary Loan, due to budgetary contraints.

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