April 28, 2006

Digital Dissertation Dust-Up

By PETER MONAGHAN

Film clips and hyperlinks in graduate theses raise tough copyright and open-source issues

Virginia A. Kuhn, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was having dissertation trouble.

Nothing unusual about that.

But it wasn't that Ms. Kuhn was struggling to finish her thesis. The trouble was that officials at the institution could not figure out whether to accept it.

Her thesis is not a printed document. It was born digital, in a multimedia