Enhanced Browsing System for Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) can be a valuable aid to learning and scholarship. However, current systems that provide access to ETDs only provide a full text and/or metadata based search and browse facility, thereby limiting ways in which users can interact with and make use of such collections. Long documents like ETDs can be viewed as containing various streams of information - textual content (in chapters, table of contents, etc.), tables, images, references, etc. In addition to presenting the ETD as a whole to the user, we present the various streams of information in a synergistic fashion, in order to enhance browsing and comprehension. We describe a design and a prototype for an enhanced web based ETD browsing system, called ETD-Enhance. It allows users to browse and interact with various streams of information present in ETDs, in an integrated fashion. To allow this, we have developed tools to extract individual chapters, figures, captions, etc. from these PDF files. For our pilot study, we have prototyped ETD-Enhance on a small collection of ETDs, and have made the prototype available for public viewing and to collect feedback. We plan to research better techniques for extracting different information streams, as well as better support for user interaction, and to extend our work to the entire collection of ETDs.