ETD Guide:Introduction - Improve visibility
From DL Curriculum Project
Table of Contents: ETD Guide
Once ETDs are collected on behalf of educational institutions, digital library technology makes it easy for
works to be found. Through http://www.theses.org/, NDLTD directly makes ETDs
available, and points to other services that facilitate such discovery. As a result, hundreds or thousands of
accesses per year per work are logged, for example, according to reports from the Virginia Tech library
regarding the ETDs it makes publicly accessible. As the collection of available ETDs grows and reaches
critical mass, it is likely that it will be frequently consulted by the millions of researchers and graduate
students interested in such detailed studies, expositions of new methodologies, reviews of the literature on
specialized topics, extensive bibliographies, illustrative figures and tables, and highly expressive
multimedia supplements. Thus, students and student works will become more visible, facilitating
advances in scholarship and leading to increased collaboration, each made possible by electronic
communication, across space and time.
Next Section: Accelerate workflow: graduate more quickly, make ETDs available faster to outside audience
