Marketing for participation: How can Electronic Dissertation Services win authors?

Abstract

Technical progress in electronic publishing affords increasingly sophisticated archiving and retrieval options for authors as well as readers of ETD and other university document publishing services. The "marketing" of these services has received less attention, despite its great importance for success. In particular, an ETD service must market to its potential authors - their work is what constitutes the service's content. Providing such content may require additional time and effort: The creation of an adequate electronic document involves the intellectual and technical (re-)structuring and markup of a text. What forms of information policy and author support are needed to meet these new challenges for authors? This paper describes a large-scale, questionnaire-based study of the marketing strategies of the Document and Publication Server of Humboldt University Berlin (http://edoc.hu-berlin.de). This service emphasises long-term archiving and structured retrieval, which requires authors to prepare their texts for conversion into the relatively complex, SGML-based format DiML (Dissertation Markup Language). In this study, the experiences, assessments, plans, and wishes of two central target groups of authors were investigated: people working on their doctoral and "Habilitation" dissertations. The results show that a large percentage of authors do not know the service, and if they do, start using it very late. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving the information flow between ETD service and authors.