An SGML/HTML Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Library

Abstract

The Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Project (ETD) was launched in 1987 at an Ann Arbor, MI, meeting arranged by UMI and attended by representatives of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VT), the University of Michigan (UM), SoftQuad, and ArborText. VT funded the development of a Document Type Definition (DTD) for dissertations and theses. The project continued at VT, with collaboration from the Coalition for Networked Information, the Council of Graduate Schools, and UMI, among others. Since 1994, many VT students have submitted their dissertations and theses in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). As of January 1997, VT requires its students to submit their projects in electronic form rather than in paper. The long-term plan is to have them submitted in both PDF and SGML. VT’s ETD Project is part of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, funded by a grant from the U.S. Dept. of Education. VT has been joined by 25 universities in supporting this effort. The aim of my initial project was to describe a potential online library of dissertations and theses at the University of Michigan. The focus was on the SGML markup of sample dissertations using the TEI DTD and an HTML-based user interface for searching and retrieval. These latter elements will be developed as the body of electronic dissertations at UM grows. The electronic dissertations described here can be thought of as extensions of their print counterparts. Software, multimedia projects, and other natively electronic submissions are a different animal entirely and are not addressed in this project. The discussion of the initial project is followed by an update on the realized project at the University. I acquired four dissertations to show the breadth of types that would need to be covered by the selected DTD. The first is the doctoral dissertation of Rebecca Price-Wilkin on the architectural history of a French church, prepared for the UM Department of Art History. Price-Wilkin’s document was used as an example of an image-rich dissertation. The second is the doctoral dissertation of David Ruddy on the medieval travelogue Mandeville’s Travels, completed for the UM Department of History. Ruddy’s shows how historic texts can be represented in this model. A