Susan Copeland: E-Theses Developments in the UK

5. Practical Developments

Having gained a significant amount of interest in the subject of ETDs, members of UTOG planned to implement ’Phase 2‘ of their strategy: the design and implementation of a prototype. Using some remaining funding from the original project, the Science and Engineering Library, Learning and Information Centre at the University of Edinburgh proceeded to undertake a small scale pilot project to create example ETDs. The results of this work were demonstrated to academic and library staff at a seminar at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. The work by the Edinburgh team again proved useful in terms of publicising ETDs and demonstrating the benefits of making theses available in electronic format. However, it became clear that a significant amount of additional work was needed to produce a model for the production, management and use of ETDs at national level, and that a substantial amount of funding would be needed to achieve this.

Until such large scale funding could be obtained, small scale progress was made wherever opportunities arose. For example, in 2000, five universities agreed to act as pilot sites to participate in a JISC funded trial of a new template designed to allow electronic submission of theses information to the ’Index to Theses‘. (The latter, first published by ASLIB and now published by Expert Information Ltd., <5> is an abstracting and indexing service covering higher degree theses published in the UK and Ireland which provides a link to the British Library‘s ’British Thesis Service‘).


Footnotes:
<5> http://www.theses.com



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