The evolving genre of electronic theses and dissertations

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are a unique genre that is emerging in part as a result of the work to build the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). Virginia Tech began requiring ETDs January 1, 1997 and has since received over 1350. Quality has already improved and what one has learned is more broadly shared now due to the intense interest in ETDs. This is a flexible genre that will enhance digital libraries in part because over half contain color images or other multimedia, including audio, video, or VRML files. Due to free access, many have been downloaded thousands of times. As the NDLTD expands, tens of thousands of these will be created each year all over the globe and in the near future the NDLTD will broadly support multilingual and federated searching. This paper presents findings at Virginia Tech as a case study of shifting book-length works to electronic documents for the global digital library.