CNI’s ETD Survey While much of the earliest discussion of ETDs was centered in the United States, the concept has gained considerable global uptake. As well as numerous institutional adoptions of ETDs worldwide, some countries have established national-level ETD policies and strategies. As a founding and active member of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) organization, CNI has been involved in these developments on a continuing basis. At NDLTD annual conferences, individuals representing universities and other groups come together to discuss developments related to ETDs. By the 2007 conference, it was apparent that some countries, for example Australia and the Netherlands, were making great strides in implementing national ETD programs.3 In the US, due at least in part to our highly decentralized system of higher education, some institutions had moved quickly and aggressively, while others continued to debate the pros and cons of such a program. At CNI, we wanted to better understand the state of progress of implementation of ETD programs in US universities and colleges and also wanted to learn what factors were facilitating or inhibiting ETD adoption. We were also eager to gain insight into whether ETD programs were being treated as a way to simply manage paper dissertations by other means (much like the situation today with scientific journal articles, which are distributed and stored digitally, but still conform very close to the historical printed articles in terms of content and organization). We developed a survey to collect data to better understand the state of ETD deployment in US universities and colleges.4 The survey was sent to one institutional representative from each CNI higher education member often this was the library director or the head of digital library programs. The results of the survey may be biased due to this factor—while many ETD programs are collaborations among the library, the Graduate School, and other units, our responses came predominantly from the library community. The US higher education members of CNI (a subset of the membership) were asked to complete the survey in spring 2008, and responses were received from 88 (62%) of the 142 institutions contacted. Of respondents, 64 (73%) reported that they had instituted an ETD program and an additional 5 institutions stated that they were planning such a program. Note that for the remainder of this article, the percentages given pertain to the institutions that have implemented ETD programs, not to the total number of survey RLI 270 8 ETDs and Graduate Education: Programs and Prospects ( C O N T I N U E D ) JUNE 2010 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
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