E-theses and Indian academia: A case study of nine ETD digital libraries and formulation of policies for a national service☆

This paper examines the developments in ETD repositories, in particular PhD thesis repositories, in India. The purpose is to perform a preliminary study and explore the possibilities for creating a national repository for the deposit, discovery, use and long-term care of research theses in an open access environment. The author looks at the current state of deployment of ETD repositories in the academic sector and discusses the subject coverage, number of items, access policy, browse/search option, and value added services. This study raises questions about policies and strategies that national higher education, research funding and policy-making bodies, as well as individual institutional communities within the higher education sector will want to consider. In spite of the great interest in e-theses development and the fact that the majority of doctoral theses in India are being produced electronically, no wide scale activity has been initiated by the government in terms of the storage and dissemination ...