Kimberly Douglas, Betsy Coles, George Porter, Eric Van de Velde: Taking the Plunge: Requiring the ETD |
Now that interest had been raised and the library staff were gaining practical experience at a volume that allowed for constructive learning, it was time to address the issues necessary for a successful mandatory submission.
Over the following months, September 2001 to April of 2002, library staff addressed the issues that essential to making the ETD submission mandatory. The Library established a team of four: Head of Technical Services, two subject librarians and the systems application developer maintaining the ETD-db software. In addition, one of the senior library managers provided guidance and encouragement as needed to negotiate new relationships with interested parties on campus. Together this group worked through the various implementation issues: Refining policies and procedures with the Graduate Office and guiding users to appropriate tools and instructions via a website and in briefing sessions in the library;
In April of 2002, the Library staff made a formal presentation to the Graduate Studies Committee at which the new Website for the ETD was debuted. Later in May 2002, the Dean of Graduate Studies made the ETD submission required for all PhD candidates as of July 2002.
The most serious concern was raised by the Graduate Student representative, who, though recognizing that most Caltech graduate students would have no difficulty preparing a PDF document, was concerned that there would be a few who would encounter difficulty. Given the deadlines that a Grad student has to meet, there was concern that students not be faced with more steps. The committee did discuss without conclusion the nature of the printed theses versus the electronic theses. The library decided that it would continue to add a printed copy of the theses to the collection. In fact, the library decided to keep the printed theses as the version of record thus avoiding a potentially controversial issue. At the meeting, it was clear that the faculty still felt very strongly that the research results in a thesis needed to be written-up in a proper manner. It was considered still very much necessary that a student articulate in English the nature of their work. Media, images, datasets would not suffice to describe and document the work, although such could be added to augment the work.
The primary issue had to do with the size of files. Some astrophysics theses with images could be as much as a few thousand MB<5>. This was not reasonable for downloading. Guidance for dividing a single thesis into separate files needed to be established. In addition, questions were raised about how to restrict access to portions of a thesis for patenting purposes. There were also a few questions having to do with making editing corrections to the thesis after it had been uploaded. Some students followed up to be sure that the abstract to the thesis was presented well in the NDLTD environment.
Footnotes: | |
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Carolyn Patterson of the Digital Media Center at Caltech prepared extensive explanations on how to package large documents in pdf. These instructions are available at: http://morel.caltech.edu/classes/pdfs/0612PDF%20for%20Long%20Documents.pdf | |
To be specific, a biochemistry thesis came in at 7500 MB. The student did segment it so that all portions were smaller than 300 MB. |
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