ETD 2008 in Aberdeen

I recently attended ETD 2008.  The ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) conferences are sponsored by NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations).  I'm on the board of NDLTD and try to get to the conferences when possible.  This year's conference was at the Robert Gordon University (The Professional University) in Aberdeen Scotland.  There continues to be a lot of activity around ETDs, probably because this is one of the first types of digital material generated locally that libraries have had to cope with.  New services, such as the UK's  EThOS system have been in development for some time, but are just now becoming available.

A lot of the people that come to these conferences are first-timers trying to understand how to cope with digital theses on their campuses.  In fact the conferences often run a special pre-session just to get new-comers up to speed (I gave a short talk at ETD 2008's about ETD metadata).  We get a fair number of repeat participants, however.  A Canadian librarian I was talking to as we walked between buildings told me she had come to a conference a few years ago.  When she went back to her campus she told herself 'I can do this' and started up their ETD program.  She was finding this year's conference very helpful in keeping up with what has been happening since then.

As part of my board duties in co-chair of the Services and Standards committee, and thanks in large part to my co-chair (Ana Pavani from Brazil) we made some progress in updating ETD-MS, NDLTD's suggestions on how to extend Dublin Core metadata for electronic theses.  In particular we decided on ways to code degree level (0, 1 & 2 for undergraduate, masters and doctoral), access rights (no public access, limited public access, full public access), and plan to add a dc.publisher.country element.

One of the treats of going to the conference was the chance to catch up with Herbert Van de Sompel.  My group here at OCLC has been involved in the OAI-ORE work, and Herbert gave an excellent talk about it at the conference.  He also talked about the MESUR project he consults on.  He had some nice pictures show relationships between fields based on people's movement journal to journal while looking for articles.  He claims that the traditional impact factor measurement for the importance of journals gives very different results than most measures based on the usage data they have been analyzing.

Another interesting talk was about a program supported by NDLTD to use LOCKSS to preserve electronic theses, as part of the MetaArchive Cooperative.  Martin Halbert from Emory attended the conference to talk about this, along with Gail McMillan of Virginia Tech who has long been involved with ETDs and NDLTD.

I enjoyed Aberdeen.  I've only been there before for a few hours twenty-some years ago.  This time I went in a couple of days early and was able to rent a car and get out to see two great castles (Drum and Crathes).  Both are well preserved with beautiful grounds.  The number of gray granite buildings in the city is remarkable, but they are not as attractive as they might be.  Old Aberdeen, however, was charming, and it was nice of the city to put on a reception for us at the Beach Ballroom.  I can also highly recommend Marks & Spencer's scones with Jersey double cream.

As part of OCLC's support to NDLTD we harvest metadata about ETDs, and make a union catalog (which includes metadata from WorldCat) harvestable.  This is starting to be a sizeable file, with nearly 750,000 records in it right now.

--Th