4. Conclusion

Two deliberate decisions greatly assisted quick implementation of the etd requirement:: The subject liaison librarians were involved in the implementation. This spread the workload over a larger public service staff resulting not only in a manageable additional burden to each but also in gaining their energy and excitement toward making this project a success. Their liaison responsibilities and experience facilitated reaching out to the various departmental groups on campus. Also, the premier role of the bound printed thesis in the traditional launching of an academic career was not challenged. The library decoupled the concept of requiring an electronic thesis and establishing the copy of record. Students and faculty are more likely to try new approaches if the risk is low. Faculty, particularly, are conservative by nature and are legitimately concerned about the career impact on their students of some of the changes in the digital era. By maintaining the print thesis as the copy of record, the electronic version while including the text of the printed theses can contain additional content in different formats or even different versions of the thesis to accommodate more adventurous presentation media. We are just beginning to see this occur as we conclude the first year of required electronic theses.

The Caltech Libraries implementation of the ETD requirement was definitely one that required planning and an organizational willingness to learn from concurrent experience. Not all issues were solved or were even explicitly addressed. Archiving procedures remain to be thoroughly worked out. To a large extent it is our assessment that all perspectives on true archiving are somewhat preliminary and await the promulgation of ubiquitously followed standards and robust tools for both author and digital archivist. These are evolving certainly. In the meantime, we do encourage authors to submit the source files of their thesis whenever possible. These are kept hidden from the database user and are intended to be used solely for file format migration purposes. Additionally, as more students responded to the requirement of an ETD, more faculty have been tangibly touched causing challenging feedback in regard to the bureaucracy and formalities involved in the awarding of a PhD. Nevertheless, the overall commitment by the faculty is great enough to assure that the questions will be overcome.

Not all problems are completely solved. It is absolutely not a turn-key process. We realized that some issues will need to be resolved over time. The voluntary ramp-up period allowed library staff the window to develop the essential tools and procedures and to identify the critical issues. The most important result is that we have managed to create a climate wherein all students must participate yet with little or no risk. This allowed the campus community to demonstrate to themselves that creating and submitting an ETD is neither onerous nor impossible. We‘ve been successful by being flexible and nimble to respond aggressively, knowledgeably and quickly when needed.

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