INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Requiring Theses in Digital Form: the First Year at Virginia Tech

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

The strategy: Require students to submit theses and dissertations in digital form. Then create a data base on the World-Wide Web that provides free and instantaneous access to graduate students' research, which has traditionally been difficult to get.

Virginia Tech says that if enough institutions adopt the idea, the improved access should lead to greater use of the hundreds of thousands of theses and dissertations completed each year, establishing them as a "new genre" of widely distributed research. Electronic submissions also would jazz up graduate work, officials here say, by allowing students to include sound and video clips, interactive simulations, and more color illustrations than are possible on paper.

"It has the potential to impact the culture of research," says Len Peters, the university's graduate dean.

Librarians here point to other benefits of electronic dissertations as well. Moving dissertations to cyberspace would free precious shelf space in university libraries. And in the process of putting their work on line, students would learn valuable computer skills.

But not everyone agrees that achieving this vision of electronic dissertations is possible, or even desirable.

Some scholarly societies have instituted policies against electronic publishing of dissertations, arguing that research is not ready for prime time until it has been carefully reviewed by peers. Other critics say that while the bells and whistles possible in computerized dissertations are interesting, most master's-degree and doctoral students are better off taking their printouts to Kinko's.

Last year, Virginia Tech decided to plunge in anyway, issuing a requirement that theses and dissertations be filed in electronic form only. Administrators say they took the step to jump-start the process and to make the research as accessible as possible. "It was our sense that if we slowly migrated into it, it would not move quickly at all," says Dr. Peters.

The decision drew harsh criticism from some graduate students. A few said making their work available on the Web would hinder their efforts to get the same material into print -- either as a book or as a journal article -- because some publishers frown on prior publication. Other students complained that the last thing they wanted to do after years of work was spend time learning to format their material for the World-Wide Web.

So university administrators modified the policy, requiring theses and dissertations to be submitted electronically but allowing each student to choose one of three levels of access. A student can let anyone on the Web read a work; let only people with accounts at Virginia Tech read it; or keep it off line entirely. Administrators also said they would consider exceptions to the on-line requirement for students who didn't have time -- or access to the right equipment -- to go digital.

Creating a basic electronic thesis from a standard word-processing file isn't that difficult, the officials argue. The university has held how-to workshops and created on-line manuals explaining the process.

Now, in the effort's second year, administrators call the project a success, and say its benefits are already visible.

The university has put about 700 theses and dissertations on line, and a few titles have been flying off the digital shelves. A thesis on cellular-telephone networks has been called up more than 7,000 times since it was put on line. That kind of demand is unheard of for a printed thesis, says Gail M. McMillan, head of scholarly communications and special collections at Virginia Tech's library. "Usually," she says, "dissertations get checked out a couple of times."

Some students are taking advantage of the multimedia capabilities of electronic dissertations. About 25 of the documents contain video clips, and one dissertation includes 42 sound clips of parrot calls. "You can do something that doesn't fit on an 8½-by-11 sheet of paper," Ms. McMillan says.

John L. Eaton, associate provost for graduate studies, says electronic theses and dissertations come in three flavors. "Plain vanilla" offerings use little or no electronic enhancement; "chocolate ripple" projects incorporate color photographs or links to material on the World-Wide Web; and "macadamia-nut fudge" productions include sounds, movies, or simulations.

The middle category is seeing the most growth, he reports -- more students are including color photographs illustrating their research. Because color photocopies can be expensive, he says, such illustrations are unusual in printed theses and dissertations.

Even greater benefits will come later, he adds, when other universities follow Virginia Tech's lead.

The university is promoting what it calls the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, which it hopes will become an international collection of graduate work. The effort is supported by about $210,000 from the U.S. Department of Education and more than $1-million from corporate sponsors, including Adobe, I.B.M., and Microsoft. Information about the project is available on the World-Wide Web (http://www.ndltd.org/).

So far, 21 universities have promised to participate in the project. But unlike Virginia Tech, none of them have made electronic submission a requirement.

"I think it's a matter of evolution," says Joe Moxley, an English professor at the University of South Florida. He is chairman of a task force on electronic theses and dissertations for his university, which has joined the digital-library project. At the moment, he says, many graduate students on his campus aren't even comfortable using the Internet, much less putting their dissertations on line. But, he adds, "I think eventually it will be a requirement here," although he estimates that such a change is at least two years away.

Veva Vonler, associate dean for graduate studies at Texas Woman's University, says it might take even longer for her university to require on-line submission of graduate work. The university has expressed interest in joining the digital project. "The biggest obstacle I see," she says, "is education all around -- getting our faculty and students to buy into it."

Some librarians worry about doing away with paper copies of theses and dissertations, as Virginia Tech has done. They fear that technological advances in the future will render today's on-line information difficult, or impossible, to read. Ms. McMillan, of Virginia Tech, is confident that as technology changes, the university can simply reformat existing data files. And, she notes, the digital copies are still sent to U.M.I. Dissertations Publishing, the Ann Arbor, Mich., company that serves as a clearinghouse for theses and dissertations in the United States and Canada. U.M.I. prints the electronic dissertations out and microfilms them.

Virginia Tech officials say the improved access is worth the effort. "If we could create this international network," says Dr. Eaton, the associate provost, "you could find any thesis in any library in the world" instantly, and at no charge.

At the moment, most printed theses and dissertations are hard to get hold of. Dissertations, and some theses, are usually filed in only two locations: in the library of the university where the student worked, and at U.M.I., which was once called University Microfilms Inc. Interested scholars, who can consult a data base of dissertation abstracts, can request the works through interlibrary loan or order a copy from U.M.I. Last year, the company began making new dissertations available in an electronic form, and they can be ordered, for about $20, over the Internet.

Traditionally, Dr. Eaton says, many scholars haven't bothered reading dissertations, because the works haven't been readily available. Even cutting-edge ideas and research results that are good enough to be published in a scholarly journal, he says, usually do not reach a wider audience until months after the work was completed. "When you prepare a derivative article from a thesis, you leave a good deal behind," he says. "There's a great deal of original research that someone else could pick up and pursue successfully. That research gets lost."

But some scholarly societies and other publishers of academic journals warn that there are dangers in making theses and dissertations too widely available, because the work has not gone through a vigorous peer-review process.

Robert D. Bovenschulte, director of publishing for the American Chemical Society, says that the society considers electronic publication of a dissertation to be prior publication, and that such a status "would remove the article from consideration from A.C.S." Like the medical community, he says, chemists want to keep checks on the quality of research that is being widely disseminated. "We don't want information out there until it's been peer-reviewed."

Of course, anyone can order a copy of a printed dissertation. But "it's been winked at," Mr. Bovenshculte says, "because everybody knows there's been very little access as a practical matter."

Other societies have similar policies. The American Society for Microbiology has a policy stating: "A manuscript whose substance was included in a thesis or dissertation posted on a host computer to which there is access via the Internet is unacceptable for submission to an A.S.M. journal on the grounds of prior publication."

But Virginia Tech officials argue that scholars, knowing that the research has not yet been peer-reviewed, usually treat a dissertation or thesis differently than they treat a journal article. And students who are worried about future publication can simply restrict access, administrators say.

Some large journal publishers, such as Elsevier Science, have publicly supported the project. Karen Hunter, senior vice-president at Elsevier, described the company's policy in a letter to Virginia Tech in December. "We believe that distribution as a dissertation is sufficiently different from publication in a refereed journal to not be of concern," she wrote.

But in an interview, Ms. Hunter says it is "conceivable that an editor would reject" an article submitted to an Elsevier journal because of prior publication on the Web. Individual editors decide what to accept or reject, she says.

Uncertainties about editorial policies have led more than 100 Virginia Tech students to opt for the "no access" option, meaning that no one can read their dissertations until they allow it. And some students who once supported the plan have begun to have doubts.

Martha McCollum, a doctoral student in animal science at Virginia Tech, was one of the first students to put her master's thesis on line there and has been a supporter of the electronic-dissertation project. But recently, she heard that a journal in which she hopes to publish, the Journal of Animal Science, is devising a policy against electronic dissertations.

"I was going to yank that thing from the Web site if it was going to interfere with the journal article that I'm trying to get published," she says. The editor reassured her that her article wouldn't be affected by the new policy. "I don't know how I feel about the whole project," she adds. "I'm really ambivalent at this point."

She urges the editors of journals to reconsider their stance. "It's not fair to turn around and be penalized by these research societies," she says. She worries that some editors could interpret a prohibition on on-line publication to include, for instance, descriptions of scholars' research on e-mail lists. "Are people going to be afraid to even tell what research they're doing?"

The plan has other critics as well. For its part, U.M.I. says universities should continue to submit most dissertations in traditional form and let the company make them available on the Internet. William E. Savage, director of dissertations publishing at U.M.I., says the company's philosophy is to "be as flexible as possible and let them appear in the format that is most appropriate to the author's discipline." He notes that the Virginia Tech project threatens the company's profits, which come primarily from selling copies of dissertations. "We would either have to raise prices for our publishing or go out of business," he says.

Virginia Tech administrators say they aren't trying to drive U.M.I. out of the picture. Ms. McMillan, of the university's library, suggests that some institutions participating in the digital-library project may want to outsource electronic storage to a company like U.M.I. rather than handle it themselves.

Dr. Peters, the graduate dean, says the electronic age will probably bring other changes to dissertations. He says the Internet could be used to improve the review process by allowing "virtual dissertation committees," made up of experts from several universities who could discuss a work by e-mail.

In any case, he says, scholarship stands to gain as it becomes easier for more scholars to read the latest dissertations and theses. Such access, he says, "is going to make us pay more attention to the quality of what gets in our dissertations."