Friday, January 10, 2003

Archiving Company Creates Online-Submission Process for Dissertations and Theses By FLORENCE OLSEN ProQuest Information and Learning, a company that publishes about 55,000 dissertations and master's theses each year, has set up an electronic-submission process to save graduate students hassles at the end of their big ordeal. The new service, which the University of Texas at Austin will begin testing this month, provides a Web site with customized Web pages for participating graduate schools. The service will become widely available later in the year. Nearly every North American research university sends its graduate students' work to ProQuest's UMI repository, formerly known as University Microfilms. But only 5 percent of the documents -- about 3,000 a year -- are submitted in an electronic format, says Daniel Arbour, executive director of the UMI division. The new Web-based service provides an efficient means for students and graduate schools to submit their documents in Adobe Systems' PDF format -- at no additional cost to the students or graduate schools, Mr. Arbour says. Graduate students using the new service will pay the same $55 author's fee that students currently pay to submit their works on paper. At most graduate schools, submissions are mandatory. Web-based submissions procedures will speed the process of getting dissertations published online, where other graduate students can use them, says Timothy L. Brace, a senior systems analyst in the Office of Graduate Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, which has one of the largest populations of graduate students in the nation. UMI's dissertations index and repository are two of the primary tools that let graduate students see what research is being done in their fields. After defending their works, graduate students will be able to use the Internet to upload their documents to a ProQuest server. Evaluators from the graduate schools can then log on to the server to check the electronic documents for completeness and accuracy, using online checklists tailored to each graduate school's requirements. When the documents are verified, the graduate-school evaluators can then transfer the full-text and abstract files to another ProQuest server for publication on the Internet. For the new service, ProQuest licensed technology from the Berkeley Electronic Press, which has developed a Web-based infrastructure for electronic peer-review and electronic-journal publishing. Three professors at the University of California at Berkeley started the press in 1999. Some researchers predict that the new service will not only encourage more students to submit dissertations in electronic format, but will also encourage them to embed databases and audio and video files in their works. "Most of the electronic dissertations right now are fairly traditional," says Peter D. Syverson, vice president for research and information services with the Council of Graduate Schools, in Washington. An electronic-submissions process could encourage graduate students to do more with multimedia, he says. "Our basic position is that anything that helps graduate students get through this process and create a better product at the same time is a good thing." The electronic-submissions service is only the first of a series of scholarship-related online services that ProQuest plans to offer. "We're talking about authoring tools and administrative tools and a review process that really coordinate the students, the faculty, and the administration on campus," Mr. Arbour says. A future service might include online research, collaboration, and editing tools that graduate students and members of their doctoral committees could use while writing and performing critiques of the dissertation. "To expedite better research," Mr. Arbour says, "we need to provide doctoral students with better tools up front." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

N.C. State's provost resigns after chancellor fires 2 of his senior administrators Dartmouth College's swim team raises $2-million to sustain program Subscription service's difficulties could be costly for libraries and publishers National strikes shut down most higher education in Venezuela Archiving company creates online-submission process for dissertations and theses