Poster Abstracts

Objective: To examine current practices with special attention to workflows and divisions of labor among ETD programs in North Carolina

Methods: The authors will administer a broad, simple online survey to acquire information from colleagues in the NC ETD community. Surveys will be emailed in early March with data collected throughout the month, then analyzed with results written up in April.

Preliminary survey questions:
How many graduate degrees are offered by your institution?
How many require submission of a thesis or dissertation?
Is electronic submission required or optional?
Does this vary by academic unit?
Which departments are involved in administering ETD at your institution?
Who was responsible for determining the division of labor between libraries, graduate schools, and IT departments?
How much collaboration and communication exists between these departments?
Which personnel perform what ETD tasks?
Is there a written procedure or workflow for the ETD process?
Does your institution provide digitization and storage or contract it out?

Results: We anticipate finding a variety of collegial relationships between academic departments, as well as a variety of systems and processes designed by universities to accommodate organizational structures, academic programs, and other requirements.

Conclusions: By examining existing task relationships and workflows, we hope to identify patterns so as to offer suggestions for institutions planning ETD programs and those wishing to improve or streamline current programs.

Open access is the cornerstone of the open knowledge movement. For much of human history knowledge was a gift and even a necessity for preserving history, faith, health, and scientific discovery, shared openly without an expectation of compensation. Knowledge was recorded for posterity, often with no commercial intent. The invention of movable type and printing presses introduced the concept of a knowledge mass market, and knowledge eventually became known as a commodity to be sold, marketed, or even given away with embedded advertising. Commercial publishing expanded the quantity and availability of printed knowledge, while copyright laws protected the author and publisher’s monopoly over distribution, reproduction, and performance.

Libraries and universities have historically expanded access and asserted free, unencumbered access to knowledge for all visitors and readers, though the growth of academic and public libraries are limited by budgets constraints. The existence of a networked digital library of theses and dissertations asserts a right of public access, fair use, and the existence of non-commercial interests supporting the public good.

The 21st century rapid expansion of the digital scholarship movement and access to electronic theses and dissertations empowers readers everywhere to consider how much we take for granted in a world offering more and more open access. There are dramatic, entertaining, and inspiring stories to we hope you can share about how open access to academic scholarship furthered both student, institutional and commercial success. NDLTD is sponsoring a 2009 youtube contest, open to the global academic community of scholars and students, to tell stories and share the benefits of open access to electronic theses and dissertations. The contest winners will be announced on the 2009 Open Access Day and on the NDLTD website, and submissions will be featured in the future on the NDLTD site. Please submit your video here: http://www.youtube.com/group/etd2009

Brazil is a very large country that spreads from the North of the Equator to the South of the Tropic of Capricorn; it has many landscapes and climates. The population concentration and the Human Development Index vary from region to region.

The South and South East have the highest population density and the highest development levels. The majority of oldest and most traditional graduate programs in the country are in these regions too.

ETDs in Brazil started in the late 1990s. In 2001 a project of the Ministry of Science and Technology created the Brazilian national consortium of ETDs. At that moment, there were only 3 universities with ETD programs – 2 were in the South East and the third in the South.

The national consortium is named BDTD – Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações (http://bdtd.ibict.br) and it is operated and managed by IBICT – Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (http://www.ibict.br/). BDTD developed free and open software for th universities to use. Training sessions were held all over the country in order to support the local institutions.

At the moment there are 78 institutions with ETD programs and the National Consortium holds over 83,000 metadata records. All institutions operate digital libraries that are OAI-PMH – Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting data providers.

This poster shows the evolution of ETDs programs – mapping geographical regions and sizes of collections, currently present in all regions of Brazil.

Organizations like the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank work with country governments, non-governmental organizations and knowledge domain experts to develop Country Assistance Strategies for client countries. The purpose of this research is to explore the extent to which those Country Assistance Strategies are aligned with the academic research produced by or about those countries.

Methodology: A sample set of developing and middle-income Country Assistance Strategies will be used to determine the base of need for research and development for each country. Semantic analysis methods will be used to characterize the knowledge domain of the R&D need. Theses and dissertations targeted to the country or generated from within the country will be used to define the R&D agenda on a practical level. Research agendas or foci discussed by professional associations, academic institutions or academies in the country also will be used to define the R&D base. Semantic analysis methods will be used to characterize the R&D focus. Comparisons of need and focus will be drawn, gaps will be highlighted, and opportunities for alignment will be identified.

ETDs facilitate more timely exchange of information among scholars and improve distance learning without any geographical barrier. It supports teaching, learning and research while reaching unreachable without walls through digital libraries. Greater revolution has occurred in the libraries recent past converting paper-based libraries to electronic based ones. With the emergence of WWW and availability of national and global networks, universities and libraries have turned their attention to ETDs rather than building printed-based TD collection. In this way, librarian’s role dramatically changed and is responsible for what ETDs available for their users and how users can access to the available information within the physical walls of the library or elsewhere for scholarly communication.

ETDs can be defined as theses and dissertations which are submitted in electronic format and facilitate use of multimedia, reference linking while accessing electronically.TQM methods can be applied to build up these ETD collections. It promotes quality management of ETD collections widely. Edward Deming and J.M. Juan are the two people who gave birth to TQM. According to them, TQM strongly focused on clients while helping them to know their needs and meeting those needs exceeding their expectations. And also TQM facilitates commitment to quality and continuous improvement, adopting systematic and scientific approach to operations (Viljoen and Underwood, 1997).

ETDs are playing an important role in the university community.TQM methods are using widely in western countries to develop ETDs rather than developing countries.

TQM can be defined as -

• Total – staff, suppliers, customers
• Quality – quality of work, products
• Management – quality of leadership

Main TQM Principles –

• Plan (P)
• Do (D)
• Check (C)
• Action (A)

When applying TQM methods for ETD collection, it can be divided into three categories as follows-

• 1. Exploring and planning
• 2. Processing and operating
• 3. Evaluating and improving

Using TQM methods for ETD development, library professionals can understand user’s expectations and they meet their expectations. It lowers cost of operation while improving the quality of ETD collection to attract and retain more university scholars. ‘TQM is defined as a management method relying on the cooperation of all the members of an organization. A management method that centers on quality and on the long-term success of the organization through the satisfaction of the customers, as well as the benefit of all its members and society’ (Information Resources Guide on TQM 2000-2005). Total Quality Management (TQM) for ETDs .

In this Internet era, modern libraries have taken initiation to extend their services through open access. Open access helps to distribute available resources freely. This facility is a greater benefit to the developing country sector where scholars/students couldn’t access available information due to financial constraints. Open access system facilitates free access of information globally without any geographical barrier.

Digital institutional repositories improve the ability to use and reuse of its stored data eventually. Explosive growth of e-generated information can be accessed instantly via institutional repositories for extended learning. Modern information communication technologies (ICTs) facilitate to discover information automatically and establish links between related documents to form of value chain of scholarly communication. It will help to provide more dynamic extended learning service to the scholars/students worldwide. Institutional repositories provide vital academic background for extended learning. Scholars/students can access data from remote locations. Institutional repositories support all scholarly users uniformly cutting boundaries to meet their scholarly needs.

Distant learners can be part time scholars who use repositories during their free time. Modern e-repositories provide these scholars with quality, timely and relevant information electronically. This way institutional repository can reduce costs of material acquisitions and administration. Development of open access systems in institutional repositories cut serious scarcity of current research information. Open access provide full text journals and e-books for extended learning which is a greater service to the developing nation scholars/students.

During the 2007-2008 academic year, the Robert E. Kennedy Library at California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo) led the campus transition from paper to electronic thesis implementation. In facilitating this transition, the Digital Repository Librarian was charged with identifying and consulting relevant campus and library staff to determine the impact on resources and procedures and to produce a roadmap with specific campus implementation recommendations. A pilot was conducted to collect master’s thesis materials, to examine the existing information workflows and to conduct contextual inquiry interviews with system stakeholders. Several anticipated benefits resulting from this analysis included increased access and availability of graduate scholarship. More surprisingly, however, were unexpected benefits once implemented. Our paper will reveal the unexpected benefits we discovered, including decreased workloads, increased institutional efficiencies and new opportunities for collaboration and updating of existing information workflows for the Library, the Research and Graduate Programs Office and various administrative campus entities. As the ETD implementation celebrates its one year anniversary at Cal Poly, user feedback and additional new insights will be incorporated into the existing ETD structure. Successes from the ETD implementation will be applied towards the implementation of senior projects, a focus of our largely undergraduate institution.

In Fall 2007 George Mason University began an optional ETD program. This venture involves librarians from three different areas within the library. The University Dissertation and Thesis (UDTS) Coordinator who is part of Special Collections and Archives, the Digital Repository Services Librarian who is part of the Systems Office, and a Special Formats Cataloger who is part of Technical Services.

Our institutional repository known as MARS (Mason Archival Repository Service) which uses DSpace was already in existence when this project began. The Digital Repository Services Librarian worked in conjunction with the UDTS Coordinator to determine the aesthetics of the etd @ Mason collection and what information would need to be gathered from students. The UDTS Coordinator submits all dissertations and theses to MARS along with all of the metadata. Once completed the link to the MARS record is placed on the shared drive for the Special Formats Cataloger to harvest the Dublin Core record from the DSpace repository using OAI-PMH protocols. There are several steps before the record is uploaded to OCLC and exported to our local catalog.

Together these three different units have worked to build the optional ETD program and we now have 61% of students opting to have their dissertation or thesis open access instead of on the library shelf.

Many areas of this project still need improvement. One of which is the continuing education of both students and faculty in regards to the pros of open access. Additional policies and procedures need to be finalized in regards to embargoes. There should also be more conversations regarding a controlled vocabulary for use in MARS to exclude vague or general words that already appear in their title or abstract.

In the future, we hope to allow students to deposit their dissertation or thesis into MARS and input all of the metadata with the UDTS Coordinator approving the submissions.

The Technical University of Lodz Library (Poland) has started the digitization project of theses dated from the beginning of its mother university existence till the nineties. Converting old, sometimes even not legible, mostly typewriter-typed documents into digital fully searchable version was a real challenge. Doing printed copies electronically accessible to the users as a result of digitization and using the advanced optical character recognition techniques, were the priority objectives of the project.

The next very crucial goal was to explore available repositories software packages platforms like ePrints, DSpace, Fedora and others in terms of their usability. The decision was made to implement DSpace in Linux environment.

The paper discusses a lot of topics: what is the best way to present such digitized information, how should be preserved the digitized information from paper theses, which metadata scheme should be chosen, what lessons were learnt and experience picked up during the project and finally what are the implications for the further institutional repository development.

Objective: The poster presentation will use text and images to describe the electronic theses and dissertations (ETD), institutional repositories (IR), collaborations, and access at Florida State University (FSU). The ETDs include current and retrospective digitized FSU theses and dissertations; institutional repositories include etd-db and DigiTool platforms; collaborations include the FSU Graduate School, FSU Undergraduate Honors in the Major Department, and Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA); access includes open access (etd-db), campus-community only (etd-db), and restricted (DigiTool). Recent FSU ETD policies and guideline changes, copyright issues, and staff changes have impacted open access ETDs at FSU thus resulting in introducing campus-community only access option for FSU ETDs using the etd-db platform in Fall 2008 and Internet Protocol (IP) for retrospective digitized theses and dissertations using the DigiTool platform.

Methods: The poster presentation will document the history of ETDs at FSU from introduction in Fall 2003 to growth of retrospective digitized ETDs from 2005-2008 to campus-community only access option for FSU ETDs in Fall 2008 and IP restriction for retrospective digitized theses and dissertations collections in 2009 to future plans for ETD preservation via Florida Digital Archive (FDA) and MetaArchive (LOCKSS) in 2009 with text, images, and screen shots.

Results: The FSU Graduate School requested campus-community and ETD PDF document security options for FSU ETDs starting in Fall 2008. The FSU ETD policies and guidelines that introduced these options were developed by the FSU Graduate School and FSU Libraries Digital Library Center and then approved by the FSU Graduate Policy Committee for Fall 2008 implementation. Since retrospective digitized theses and dissertations did not include retrospective digitized access agreement forms, senior leadership recommended IP restriction for all FSU retrospective digitized theses and dissertations in 2009.

Conclusions: Open access concerns from the FSU Creative Writing department prompted the FSU Graduate School to request the campus-community option for FSU ETDs starting in Fall 2008 and copyright concerns from new senior leadership in FSU Libraries prompted IP restriction for retrospective digitized FSU theses and dissertations. The etd-db platform server was upgraded from 60 GB to over 130 GB and the DigiTool platform was migrated from a single implementation to a FCLA consortia implementation. Communication between major stakeholders, managerial oversight from graduate policy committee, FSU Libraries, and institutional support contributed to the development, revisions, and current FSU ETD policies and guidelines.

Institutional repositories have become lifeblood of university communities, thus improving and accelerating their scholarly work. When compare with traditional physical libraries, digital institutional repositories produce various types of information, which never met with traditional walls.

Institutional repositories are facilitating more timely exchange of information among scholars and improve distance learning without any geographical barrier. It supports teaching, learning and research while reaching unreachable without walls. Greater revolution has occurred in the university libraries recent past converting paper-based libraries to electronic based ones. With the emergence of WWW and availability of national and global networks, university libraries have turned their attention to digital collections rather than building printed-based collection. In this way, librarian’s role dramatically changed and is responsible for what e-repositories available for their users and how users can access to the available information within the physical walls of the library or elsewhere.

Institutional digital repositories will ultimately lead to paperless society, which were earlier dominated by paper. The information super highway is today thought of as a revolutionary platform intended to form a network connecting computers globally. The institutional repository is an information storage in which all the information resources are available in computer processable form and the functions of acquisition, storage, preservation, retrieval, access and display are carried out through the use of digital technologies. The resources in institutional repositories can be divided in to those that are originally created in digital format such as e-journals, e-books and on-line databases and those originally non-digital resources such as manuscripts and prints that subsequently digitized. A repository can disseminate its information across a network and users can retrieve information in the same way. The age-old concept of ownership of the traditional physical repositories now has been changed with access to digital repositories through the Internet connectivity. Internet has now provided access to huge repositories that can be considered as a paperless, wall-less, distributed multi-access, digital libraries/repositories. Institutional repositories have become life blood of the university community without any geographical barrier.

Addis Ababa University (AAU) is the oldest and largest University in Ethiopia with more than 50,000 students (both graduate and undergraduate). The University is currently engaged in an ambitious plan of expanding graduate programs at Masters and PhD levels in different disciplines. The University has started a pilot African ETD program in collaboration with the University of Witwatersrand. As part of this program, AAU runs a training workshop for librarians and researchers coming from all higher learning institutions in Ethiopia. Following the workshop, Addis Ababa University has implemented Dspace and currently populating full-text thesis and dissertation (around 3000 full-text thesis and dissertation has already been entered into the database). A server and scanner have also been secured through donation for the National ETD Repository, which is initiated by Addis Ababa University. This paper will cover the current status, opportunities, challenges, and future direction of Etds in Ethiopia.

About the development of OA to electronic thesis and dissertations in the former Soviet Union developing countries little is known. This paper presents an exploratory overview of the situation in Azerbaijan.

Institutional repositories provide universities in developing countries with a good avenue to disseminate their intellectual output to the outside world. The OA movement has not yet permeated the academic research environment. Azerbaijani University libraries have not begun to practice or promote institutional repository or are at a very early stage of it. There is yet one open access institutional repository in Azerbaijan.

We present a case study of repository development at the Khazar University (one of the leading academic universities in Azerbaijan) order to discuss key issues faced. One of the main goals of this repository is to harvest theses on all levels - bachelors’ and masters’ papers, PhD dissertations. Commonly referred to as an Institutional Repository this initiative has been creating a model for the development of archival and dissemination tools for delivering so name grey literature and scholarly materials to students, academicians in Khazar University via the Internet.

With about 60 universities, Azerbaijan boasts of more Universities than any other developing countries. This prompts a reasonable inquiry as to what constraints have prevented a country with so many academic institutions and so much research outputs from developing Open Access institutional repositories. This paper therefore seeks to highlight the opportunities and challenges to the establishment of open access institutional repositories in Azerbaijan as well as views and awareness of open access institutional repositories among scholars and researchers in the target institution of developed countries.

Until the last year there was no access to ETDs on the national level in the Czech Republic. Potential users were left with fragmented sources of varying quality. In 2004 an initiative of university librariens lead to the foundation of the ETD Working Group (WG, http://www.evskp.cz) in the framework of the Association of Libraries of Czech Universities (http://www.akvs.cz/en/). The WG set up goals and started systematic work to prepare conditions to establish a national register. The situation significantly changed after 2006 when the Higher Education Act, as amended, provided for an obligation to make ETDs accessible for the public.

Last year two projects on digital repositories were introduced in the Czech Republic - The National Register of Thesis with plagiarism detection system (2008) and The Digital Library for Grey Literature (2008-2011). The poster presents preparation and functions of both repositories and it aims, standards and the metadata used.

The WG needed to set the metadata used nationwide, allowing publishing in the international repositories. Therefore they prepared three Czech XML

standards to describe ETDs including fulltexts, persons and corporations on the basis of DC, DC terms, ETD-MS and XMetadiss formats. The standard prepared as a working paper in 2006, started to be widespread at Czech universities and significantly contributed to harvest the ETDs retrospectively. All the three standards are to be used to describe the Czech grey literature in the Digital Library. The WG in cooperation with the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague are working on a solution to integrate the non-text ETDs (audio, video etc.) into the project as an equivalent of text materials.

The poster offers the best practices for similar consortium projects, problems and their solutions learned in collaboration on the national level, by preparing licences, workflows and standards used nationwide in the Czech Republic.”

Background: -Health Information Literacy is the set of abilities needed to: recognize a health information need; identify likely information sources and use them to retrieve relevant information; assess the quality of the information and its applicability to a specific situation; and analyze, understand, and use the information to make good health decisions.

Objectives: The present study was conducted to determine the information literacy skills of resident doctors of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research’s Chandigarh. The curriculum design and priorities for promotion of information literacy are to be set for patient care and research.

Methodology: Data was collected by using the pre tested Questionnaire from the resident doctors of the institute. Analysis of the data was done by using the SPSS computer software.

Results: A sample of 236 respondents comprising of 96 senior residents and 140 junior residents using information technology services in the library was taken in the study. It was found from the total respondents that, 75.7% had attended orientation lecture delivered by the library professionals. About two third i.e 63.8% were using daily Wi-Fi connectivity in the library, 41.7% were using different search tools, 65.3% for patient care, 37.4% for research and 48.6% for thesis work. About 23.8% respondents had faced the difficulties in using the e-resources due to lack of awareness and knowledge. More than 83% doctors suggested that more orientation lecture/programs should be organized about the recent advances in Information Technology and e-resources & services available in the library.

Conclusions: Information Literacy can be included in the curricula at various levels of medical education in the form of networks, e-resources, e-journals consortia, medical databases and internet resources, etc. by utilizing the existing Information Technology infrastructure.

Keywords: - Information literacy, knowledge management, search skills

Less Developed Countries (LDC) have restricted access to scientific journals due to journal costs and constant devaluation of local currencies. Recently published literature reveals bias against research papers from LDC by major international journals. (BMJ 2004, May 22; 328(7450) & Arch Iran Med. 2008 May;11(3):257-62). Globalization demands global health. The lack of awareness of health issues of LDC is a challenge in achieving global health.

LDC lack funds and facilities for research. Researchers lack writing and research skills, are compensated poorly and burdened with additional responsibilities. Brain drain and language barriers further contribute to this dilemma. Based on their proven research capacity, output and global recognition, academic and research institutions receive funds, attract students and researchers. To encourage this process, researchers are rewarded with promotions when they publish in high impact journals. In effect, local journals with limited circulation are left with papers that are rejected by more recognized journals, leaving little space for improving the quality of their content.

These barriers are formidable challenges for Science, Technology and Medicine in LDC. Open Access (OA) provides a means of reducing the impact of these barriers.

OA facilitates accessing and communicating information beyond journal subscriptions. Despite many opportunities available to facilitate OA in LDC, participation remains low. NDLTD membership from Asia, Latin America and Africa is less than 4%, while IR on Dspace account for 29%. Although LDC can benefit from tools freely available for OA to improve research communication, these benefits are not fully realized.

Clearly, some issues cannot be resolved within communities such as NDLTD. However, sharing expert knowledge, guidance, and technical support and mentorship programs can strengthen the capacity of LDC to utilize free resources. Ultimately, this will result in reduction of the research information barriers in these areas for LDC.

The University of the Western Cape established its electronic thesis and dissertation project in 2004. A lot of progress took place ever since the project inception especially with reference to project marketing, governance and navigation of the database by university community and the world-wide communities. Much as the project was established immediately after the national visit of Virginia polytechnic Professor, the University of the Western Cape unlike other universities in the country, it developed its own in-house software that shares similar specifications with NDLTD software.

Currently the Library has over than 500 Electronic Thesis and Dissertations on the catalogue with navigation exploited by researchers and scholars from more than 15 countries a day with about 10 000 downloading a month.

To evaluate the database performance each ETD title has a built-in counter to determine records usage statistics. The poster session will outline the ETD workflow of the University of the Western Cape with special reference to governance issues ( policies , , copyright , record uploading , navigation options and portal maintenance . A brief outline of the ETD project in South Africa with issues such as software in use, funding, national trainings, and project alignment to institutional repositories will be discussed.

In conclusion as the project is facilitated through the Library but hosted in the university computer centre it is of utmost importance for the library to have guaranteed assurance of database back-up in case of emergencies. The poster will therefore give acciount hts on how this matter could be handled by use of service level agreements between two departments namely (library and computer services).

Less Developed Countries (LDC) have restricted access to scientific journals due to journal costs and constant devaluation of local currencies. Recently published literature reveals bias against research papers from LDC by major international journals. (BMJ 2004, May 22; 328(7450) & Arch Iran Med. 2008 May;11(3):257-62). Globalization demands global health. The lack of awareness of health issues of LDC is a challenge in achieving global health.

The foundation of the University was laid on November 11, 1980. The University was upgraded, restructured and reconstituted by the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in March 1985.Currently with nine (9) faculties and six (6) autonomous academies, institutes and centers, the University is conducting around ninety (90) academic programs with an enrollment of over 17,000 students that includes around 7000 female students. In addition around 2,000 are enrolled in the Iqra Technical Centre, a constituent unit of the University.

The ETD project was conceived in 2007 by inspiration from Pakistan Research Repository launched by Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan and simultaneously West Virginia University (WVU). A proposal was made keeping in view the experiences of HEC and WVU. The proposal defines the project in three phases. The first phase was aimed at to cover the digitization of approximately 6000 theses of Graduate programs in Arabic and English. In the second phase, electronic submission of theses and publishing these documents on the web for open access.

Support and technical training is being provided to students, staff, and faculty in how to create documents as PDF (Portable Document Format) files, accepting ETDs and some technical training in how to identify problems in a PDF document.

Currently we the number of digitized theses has crossed 850 mark at the approximate rate of 9 theses per day. We have also received 43 soft copies directly by students’ submission.

The project is going on smoothly hence there are challenges as reservation about copyright, threats of plagiarism, power breakdown in the country, storage of digital data & backups and hesitation to work in electronic environment.