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Recently, at Bridgewater State College, a graduate student in the English Department asked to create her thesis in digital format with Webtext, a hypertext authoring tool. Her rationale was that internal hypertext links could facilitate navigation throughout her work much more than traditional indices and tables of content in paper format could. In addition, the format allowed her more easily to use color fonts and graphical backgrounds. She believed that these features would improve the readers' experiences. Indeed, electronic publishing tools can provide more tools for author creativity and make reading more fun and enriching.
ETD at Virginia Tech
Exploration into electronic thesis and dissertation submission was initiated in 1987 by Universal Microfilms Inc. (UMI). Virginia Tech (VT) and other institutions were invited to join this initiative. After ten years, VT officially mandated this program on 1 January 1997 (http://etd.vt.edu/). VT graduate students are now required to submit their theses or dissertations electronically in digital format, while paper submissions have been phased out entirely. Students have the option to incorporate multimedia into their works, and are given access to various digital resources including editing and conversion software. In the first year after the program was launched, there were 221,679 accesses; in 2001, there were 3,236,982 accesses, an impressive increase of 1,360 per cent (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ theses/data/somefacts.html#logs). Before the ETD program went live, paper theses and dissertations were viewed only a few hundred times per year.
NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations)
To promote the ETD concept at the national level, VT faculty member Edward Fox obtained a grant from the US Department of Education to establish the National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). However, the name was soon changed to the "Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations" when the project began to attract interest internationally. Presently, NDLTD's participants include 119 universities, three consortia, and 16 institutions; there is no fee for participation, and in fact NDLTD provides free software to help participants implement ETD systems at their local institutions (http:// www.ndltd.org/members/index.htm). Their...