Kimberly Douglas, Betsy Coles, George Porter, Eric Van de Velde: Taking the Plunge: Requiring the ETD

3. Phase Two: 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.

3.1 Preparation

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;

  1. A Website http://library.caltech.edu/etd/ with advice, guidance, requirements and instructions was created. PDF was established as the primary acceptable format. For multimedia files the library chose to accept the same list of formats that University Microfilms accepts. The official document of the Graduate Office, “Caltech PhD Thesis Regulations“ as revised to include the ETD submission preparation and process. This was done by library staff rather than await the availability and inclination of the Graduate Office staff
  2. The team developed a briefing session for the students providing the essentials of what they needed to know and do to prepare an electronic thesis. In these sessions issues of acceptable fonts, preparation of images; size of single file theses and how to segment a theses for optimal usability; creation of multiple versions to address various resolution and color options; naming the files for optimal presentation were covered. In addition copyright issues are explained both from the authors and the publishers‘ point-of-view. Subject liaison librarians were also educated to these issues to lead orientation classes for graduate students and to participate in trouble-shooting responses.
  3. Library staff established a cooperative relationship with staff of Caltech‘s Digital Media Center who provide technical support for digital publishing tools. With the launching of the required electronic thesis, the DMC offered a specific class instructing authors on the mechanics of creating a PDF for Long Documents and Dissertations.<4> In collaboration with past graduates templates for Word, LaTeX and Framemaker were created and offered to the students.
  4. The ETD-db interface for author submissions was revised to meet Caltech needs and to provide additional guidance in the process.
  5. Library procedures for handling print theses were revised. Only one paper copy is now needed and it is often printed from the submitted etd. Since information about the thesis committee for the thesis is entered into the metadata for the etd though it is not actually carried in the work itself, catalogers add that information to the catalog record.
  6. The library continued to require the printed theses, though it was expected to be a bound copy of the printed PDF file to ensure that the printed copy and the electronic copy were the same. Furthermore the printed theses would continue to be the “copy of record“ or the archival copy.
  7. The Library acquired a campus site license for the Adobe Acrobat package greatly facilitating production of PDF on Windows and MacOS workstations. Further, it provides the necessary tool for combining and segmenting PDFs for optimal access management.

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.

3.2 Experience

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:

<4>

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

<5>

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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