The semester is not over yet, but each day students are one step closer to submitting dissertations. Much is involved in determining whether one is ready: literature review, sources, meeting with an advisor, chapter breakdowns, citing archival research, and more. Beyond the content, formatting considerations are looming: which citation style to use, how to incorporate electronic aspects of research into the dissertation, and then ultimately, what to make of this concept of completely electronic theses & dissertations (ETDs)?
These questions and more have been under a magnifying glass at the Graduate Center, and heightened since the #remixthediss conversations erupted last month. Yet throughout the world, doctoral and masters students are considering software that could host their work as well as challenge themselves to post-graduate study and access to this work in repositories.
The library is very much aware of these conversations, and together with a team of faculty and staff from the Futures Initiative, HASTAC@CUNY, and JustPublics@365, are sponsoring several events that respond to and expand these looming dissertation and publishing questions. In addition, every week, Futures Initiative Fellows meet to plan upcoming events and research-based initiatives. Some of these meetings will now be open to the public as Open Sessions. Open Sessions and collaborative engagements of various departments have led to the following events open to the public:
Digital Platforms for Multimedia Scholarship: SCALAR
Friday, November 21st, at 1pm
– Featuring a live demo and discussion with Alexei Taylor and Diana Taylor (NYU), moderated by Jessie Daniels (The Graduate Center)
Learn about SCALAR and other digital platforms in this conversation on media-rich online publications. These publications can contain streaming video, audio, interactive maps, graphs, tags, etc., and are already being used for dissertations and being published by university presses. Alexei Taylor, a digital interface designer, has worked with the platform for five years with students, faculty, presses, archives, and museums to explore how online tools can shape the present and pave the way for the future of academic publishing.
A light lunch and coffee will be provided. Livestreaming has been requested and will be available at http://bit.ly/FuturesED-live. .
The Evolving Dissertation Landscape: A Conversation with ProQuest
Monday, December 1st, at 1pm
– Featuring Austin McLean, Director, Scholarly Communication and Dissertations Publishing, ProQuest with Polly Thistlethwaite, Chief Librarian, The Graduate Center, CUNY
The format and make-up of dissertations and theses are vastly different than when ProQuest began making them available in 1939. How is ProQuest providing services to universities and authors in the digital age? What value can ProQuest add in an open access world? What happens to dissertations and thesis when ProQuest makes them available? Can ProQuest accept dissertations in non-PDF formats? Please join Austin McLean, Polly Thistlethwaite, and Futures Initiative fellows as we discuss the history of dissertation indexing, what ProQuest does for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), and how those digital dissertations are going to be catalogued.
Coffee will be provided. This event will be livestreamed here.
Futures Initiative Open session: New Modes of Evaluation
Monday, December 8th, 1pm
– Featuring Dr. Anthony Picciano, Professor and Executive Officer of the PhD program in Urban Education
How do you know if a program is successful, especially if it can’t easily be evaluated by traditional methods? Dr. Anthony Picciano, Professor and Executive Officer of the PhD program in Urban Education will discuss the challenges and opportunities of designing new assessment systems that reinforce the values you want to reinforce and model. Futures Initiative Open Sessions are working sessions that are open to the public. Space is limited, so please RSVP using EventBrite. Coffee will be provided.
Hi Maureen — Good question, and in many ways you answer it yourself. At the Graduate Center, all dissertations are submitted to both ProQuest and Academic Works, the GC’s open access institutional repository. Academic Works provides free access to the dissertations (except for those that are temporarily embargoed) to anyone, anywhere — but it’s not a preservation platform. ProQuest ensures the long-term preservation of the dissertations in a way that we at the GC can’t currently do. So that’s one reason why we use two platforms here. But it’s important to note that both of those platforms are really just for static, non-interactive files such as PDFs. More and more students are creating interactive, digital components of their dissertations, and it’s a big challenge to figure out how to capture and preserve those — and that’s when platforms like SCALAR and tools like Archive-It enter the conversation. Hope that helps explain!
I fail to see why there need to be separate and competing platforms to host “… completely electronic theses & dissertations …” and whose business models in some cases may eventually fail or which have incompatible data formats etc. Like with some cloud providers that failed there is always a potential risk of losing data, It’s like burning own a library. However: when one library burns down, often hundreds if not thousands of other libraries and thousands of individuals keep a specimen of the same book or journal. All of these though are “format-compatible”. Nowhere in the world is there a user who would complain “I just got this copy of Shakespeare’s plays but I can’t read it” or “Since I changed to a new computer platform/provider [you name it] I can’t read [you name it again]”. That said and with the little overhead that digitized vs. printed material requires and seeing the Library of Congress or other national libraries must by law obtain a copy, why not centralize all that and make sure the data “lode” is then copied around the world so that a) access is never a problem b) upgrading/migration strategies can be held future-proof and internationally compatible and c) unimpeded access is safeguarded?