Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Music

Theses and dissertations have long been regarded as the bedrock of graduate education. But digital representations of these works, known as electronic theses and dissertations (or ETDs), are a relatively new phenomenon that present student authors with seemingly endless possibilities to express their creativity. With this comes new learning opportunities and the possibility of widespread recognition through a heretofore unprecedented level of exposure and communication. The adaptation and exploitation of this technology also poses new challenges and problems related to copyright and the long-term retention of these documents. Operating within the larger context—a digital universe in which academe, ETDs, and ETDs in music are not living up to their potential—students preparing musical ETDs face additional challenges and problems: the integration of a variety of music formats and software into text documents, and the appropriate use of copyrighted materials, which raise issues that are more troublesome for music than other disciplines. In the following pages I will argue that the advantages of electronic theses and dissertations far outweigh the perceived disadvantages, and that the reluctance of many in the academic community to exploit this technology is unfortunate. I will also argue that the best way to provide access to ETDs is via the open Web: by creating a fully aggregated, vertical index of digital resources like that which I describe in other publications.¹ Copyright, fair use, and the question of whether or not publishers view ETDs as prior publications are also discussed.

A Concise History of ETDs²

The history of electronic theses and dissertations begins in 1987 with a meeting convened by Nick Altair of UMI in Ann Arbor, Michigan, involving participants from Virginia Tech, the University of Michigan, and two fledgling software companies: ArborText and SoftQuad. The discussion focused on the latest approaches to electronic publishing and the idea of applying the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML, an ISO standard approved in 1986) to the preparation of dissertations, possibly as an extension of the Electronic Manuscript Project of the Association of American Publishers. That same year (1987) SoftQuad released AuthorEditor, the first graphical SGML editor.

In 1988 the first SGML Document Type Definition (DTD)³ for theses and dissertations was developed by SoftQuad's Yuri Rubinsky with funding from Virginia Tech. With the appearance of Adobe's Acrobat software and Portable Document Format (PDF) in the early 1990s it became clear that students could easily prepare their own ETDs, and that the inherent complexities of SGML could be avoided where ETDs are concerned. Thus in 1994, Virginia Tech, as part of a pilot project, began to convert some of the printed theses and dissertations received from its graduate schools to PDF.

In 1996 the pace of ETD activities gained momentum when the U.S. Department of Education funded a three-year nationwide effort to extend the concept of ETDs across the country. The aforementioned pilot project at Virginia Tech led to a mandatory requirement that all theses and dissertations submitted after 1996 be only in electronic form. Thereafter the concept of ETDs spread to Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries. And, last but not least, to coordinate all these efforts, in 1996 the free, voluntary federation called the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) was established and quickly began to expand.

Today NDLTD has more than 196 member institutions, 172 of which are academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad.⁴ To date, these institutions have put a combined total of more than forty thousand ETDs online. Metadata records(similar to the cataloging information one might find in a library catalog, including title, year, author, abstract, and descriptors) for these documents can be found in the OCLC-based NDLTD Union Catalog.⁵ These records were harvested from the servers of thirty-eight NDLTD member institutions—those institutions that support the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting.Access to these documents can be categorized as open, restricted, fee-based, and mixed. Whereas open access...