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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repository as a subset of local institutional digital repositories. The paper discusses the originating institutions and organizations including Virginia Tech Initiative, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and the United States Department of Education.

This paper is informational in nature and explores the topic of ETD repositories. It provides information relevant to academic and digital librarians interested in including an ETD repository in their institution's digital library. The paper discusses interoperability among repositories and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The paper discusses issues related to ETD repositories including intellectual property rights, publishers' views of ETDs as prior publications, plagiarism issues, development costs, and long‐term preservation issues.

It was found that library administrators who implemented ETD repositories at various universities adapted their models to the needs of their institutions and their graduate students. ETD administrators made decisions about implementation models and software and hardware infrastructure in terms of human and technical resource allocation.

The paper argues that ETD repositories benefit students and universities by enhancing graduate education, expanding graduate research, increasing a university's visibility, and instructing students, faculty, administration, and librarians about digital technology.

The value of this paper for digital and academic librarians concerned with EDT repositories is in providing a historical overview, a discussion of the benefits, and a review of the issues involved with implementing an ETD repository at their institution.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) repository creation efforts by various institutions in India and also analyse whether the guidelines issued for depositing ETDs by various government bodies in India are sufficient to implement the ETD submission nationwide.

The paper is the result of the analytical evaluation of the Indian digital repositories especially ETD repositories and the guidelines issued by various government bodies for acceptance of ETDs. To obtain a complete picture of the Indian ETD repositories literature review was conducted, browsed the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), since these do not include all the Indian ETD repositories snowball technique was followed. Many of the sites were inaccessible during the study, they are discussed either on the basis of the earlier accessed record or the available literature.

Though in India University Grants Commission (UGC, 2005) and other government bodies have issued guidelines for ETD submission and UGC (in 2009) made it mandatory for all the universities to deposit a copy of the thesis submitted, in the National ETD repository, i.e. Shodhganga, yet the universities do not seem very serious about this issue so far. The study of the ETD repositories of most of the Indian universities and higher level institutions reveals that most of them are busy with the government-funded projects of retro-conversion of the PhD theses piled up in their libraries and have not taken sufficient steps for accepting the current ETD and ETD creating facilities for the researchers.

The Indian universities may expedite the process of accepting the current ETDs and plan training and workshops for the researchers, faculty, theses evaluators and librarians to make them aware about their respective responsibilities.

The Indian researches will be accessible globally resulting in the acceptability and implementation of the research findings for the society and will help in avoiding duplication of research, which means judicial utilization of the public funds, as mostly the research in India is funded by the government.

The literature survey about the ETDs in Indian libraries revealed that almost every article describes the availability of the ETDs and define the ETDs decoratively. All the existing repositories are not exhaustive and contain only retro theses, which neither anybody has tried to evaluate nor stressed on the need of starting accepting the current ETDs. This paper analyses the available collections in ETD repositories and policy provisions for ETD acceptance and also tries to identify the unclear issue before the Indian universities regarding accepting current ETDs.

Institutional repositories constitute an integral part of present day digital libraries allowing global access to scholarly publications and provides an opportunity for future research enhancement and long term preservation of information. Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) represent a growing segment of available content in institutional repositories where they contribute to the impact and ranking of their institutions. The present study traces the growth and development of online e-theses repositories in Asia within the broader framework of open access.

The present study tries to discover the composition of ETD repositories in Asia based on the seven key parameters, i.e. country, types, language, disciplines, software, content types and repository policies. To achieve the stated objectives, the ETD repositories developed by Asian countries were identified by selecting the database of OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and the retrieved data were thoroughly analyzed for the necessary information.

Theses and dissertations are considered an important part of information resources in any institution. They are often the only source of research work. Unfortunately, access to these valuable unpublished resources is often restricted to parent institution only. The authors found that ETD repositories are addressing this problem by making institutional knowledge available online and thereby not only increasing its visibility and use, but also making them contribute to the impact and ranking of their institutions. Asian countries are beginning to embrace the idea of digitizing, archiving and making their theses and dissertations available online. The study found that more than half of all IRs listed in the directory of OpenDOAR contain ETDs. ETD system is growing fast in some Asian countries. However, the number of universities having e-theses repositories is meager considering the large number of quality academic and research institutions across Asian countries.

The paper argues that ETD repositories not only benefit students and institutions by enhancing education and expanding research, but also by increasing a university’s visibility and use and thereby contributing to the impact and ranking of its parent institutions.

The study hopes to heighten awareness of research being conducted in Asia and its contribution to a global knowledge base. Some of the suggestions to improve the existing conditions and strengthen the growth rate of ETDs in Asia are also presented.

The purpose of this paper is to examine two research questions: first, How do users in different locations find Auburn University Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)? Second, do users in different locations interact differently with the collection and, if so, how?

Google Analytics data for user visits, landing pages, and page views were separated into groups based on user location. Visits data were also correlated with source (referring web site), and landing pages and page views were grouped by type.

Most local users came to the repository via Auburn University web pages. This group usually landed on the collection home page and used internal navigation pages to find what they needed. Submission page views showed that most ETD depositors were local. Most out-of-state users came to the repository via web search engines. This group usually landed directly on bibliographic information pages for individual ETDs. They used internal navigation pages less frequently than local users. Users located within the state but outside of the local area interacted with the collection in a way that was intermediate between these two groups.

Institutions interested in improving repository access for depositors will probably find it helpful to focus on in-state usage reports, while institutions seeking to improve access for end-users should exclude in-state users from their assessments.

This is the first detailed examination of ETDs usage published since 2001 and shows how filtering tools available in Google Analytics allow comparisons of user behavior based on location and source (referring web site).

The purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) initiatives in the repositories of federal government-owned universities due to the poor global visibility of ETDs from Nigeria.

An explanatory case study empirical research method was adopted for the study. Using an adapted methodology of Ghosh (2009) and multiple data gathering techniques, data was collected based on the three domains of the network of excellence on digital libraries (DELOS) digital library reference model.

The ETD initiatives in repositories of Nigerian federal universities have not made remarkable progress as digital libraries based on policy, content and system architecture. The specificity of ETDs is not clearly stated in the policies where available. The repositories housing the ETDs are also not compliant with the open archive initiative-protocol for metadata harvesting framework.

The study focussed on ETD initiatives in federal government-owned universities. Although the findings of the study are relevant to other institutions in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. It cannot be used as a basis for the generalisation based on other performance metrics.

This research study concluded that electronic theses and dissertations in Nigerian institutional repositories are not well managed for effective service delivery and long-term accessibility. The ill-management of the ETD initiatives is the reason for the poor global visibility and accessibility of these research output from this part of Africa.

The study assessed ETD initiatives using constructs from a theoretical framework.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the status of eight interoperability protocols within repositories of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) as an introduction to further studies on feasibility of deploying these protocols in upcoming areas of interoperability.

Three surveys of 266 ETD repositories, 15 common ETD management software solutions, and 136 ETD experts were conducted in order to appraise the protocols. These protocols were evaluated in four categories of aggregation, syndication, distributed search, and publishing protocols.

This study revealed that, despite its drawbacks, Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) is still the most utilized interoperability protocol within ETD providers, ETD software developers, and implementers, followed by ATOM and Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) protocols. However, in all competitive areas related to performance and functionality, ORE surpasses other protocols. It was also found that the three protocols of ATOM, PMH, and ORE could be used interchangeably in the most used cases of interoperability protocols in repositories.

In this research, a combination of methods was employed to evaluate the status of protocols, from the perspectives of data providers, software providers, and implementers. Practitioners may use these methods to assess other protocols in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

The conduct of this study has involved three types of surveys, through which different aspects of interoperability protocols are evaluated. Prior to the conduct of this study, there has yet any study focusing on the same topic, which has adopted the multi‐method that has been adopted in this study.

The purpose of this paper is to give technical information about the application of ABCD open source software for managing institutional repository of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) at various levels with illustrations.

Practical method and programming in the ABCD software for building ETD repository and its management

ABCD software is an excellent tool for creating institutional repository (IR) and manages it at various levels and to create ETD portal.

The paper describes using ABCD software how one can create database of ETDs, how to submit ETDs in full text or abstract, how to search, how to implement it in open archive environment and simplicity of making union catalogue of ETD repositories on one platform of ABCD portal.

The process of ETD management and IR building using ABCD open source software will be useful to all the new institutions, colleges, universities, national libraries, international organizations who want to initiate the process of building ETD repository.

The development team of ABCD software is still in process of releasing 2.0 versions and to develop tool for IR and ETD management. In this paper attempt has been made to describe with illustrations that how the software is making progress towards ETD management or building IR. One of the author is main project leader of ABCD open source software.

The aim of this study is to assess the metadata element sets of electronic theses and dissertations that are currently used at Canadian academic institutional repositories, and to discuss issues related to variations and inconsistencies in Dublin Core data used by participating repositories.

The formats and usage patterns of metadata elements at ten participating institutional repositories are identified and analyzed. Additionally, metadata element variations are grouped by different types.

Current metadata elements have a significant level of inconsistency and variation.

The observations drawn from this study are limited to Canadian cases only. However, the results provide insights into developing a metadata framework for institutional repositories in other countries.

This study examines empirical data collected from data providers among Canadian institutional repositories. The result of this study may be beneficial to the achievement of interoperability across institutional repositories and to the development of a standardized application profile for Canadian institutional repositories.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of total cost of ownership (TOC) for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD). Only few articles have been published to discuss the costs associated with repository and/or theses and dissertations (TD).

The paper first provides literature reviews in costs associated with repository and TD. By using the DCC life cycle model, the author presents costs for each actionable category: create or receive, appraise & select, ingest, preservation action, store, access, use and reuse and transform. The paper presents four TOCs to illustrate the changes of TOCs from 2005 to current time.

The paper gives one case study of the TOCs for ETD over the years, and illustrates how the University lowered the TOCs. The current ETD's TOC is on a par with these costs of two other studies published related to repository titles. The TOC has been decreased from the traditional paper-based TD of $75 per title to ETD of $69 in 2005. By removing the ProQuest processing fee of $55, the TOC decreased to $14.37 in 2010. The TOC is currently $6.33 per title after the ETD collection was migrated to the University of Arizona repository.

Readers shall be aware that there are no “transform” and little “preservation action” tasks performed. The current cost of “transform” is $0 due to the nature of ETD of its rigid format requirements,

The paper fulfills the need to study costs associated with repository titles, especially ETD titles. It also provide a way to estimate costs for institutions planning to start ETD collections.

This paper aims to describe recent developments in the services provided by Indian electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) repositories. It seeks to explore the prospect of knowledge formation and diffusion in India and to discuss the potential of open access e‐theses repositories for knowledge management.

This study is based on literature review and content analysis of Indian ETD repository websites. Institutional repositories and electronic thesis and dissertation projects in India were identified through a literature survey as well as internet searching and browsing. The study examines the tools, type of contents, coverage and aims of Indian ETD repositories.

The paper acknowledges the need for knowledge management for national development. It highlights the significance of an integrated platform for preserving, searching and retrieving Indian theses. It describes the features and functions of Indian ETD repositories.

The paper provides insights into the characteristics of the national repository of ETDs of India, which encourage and support open access to publicly‐funded research.