A digital library for authors: recent progress of the networked digital library of theses and dissertations

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is more than an online collection of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). It is a scalable project that has impact on thousands of graduate students in many countries as well as diverse researchers worldwide. By May 1999 it had 59 official members representing 13 countries and integrated some of the world’s newest research works, including ETD collections at Virginia Tech and West Virginia University, where ETD submission is now required. The number of accesses to the Virginia Tech collection has grown by more than half in the last year. NDLTD is committed to authors, aiming to improve graduate education for the over 100,000 students that prepare a thesis or dissertation each year. It encourages them to be more expressive by facilitating incorporation of multimedia components into their theses. NDLTD activities include: applying automation methods to simplify submission of ETDs over the WWW; specifying the application of the Dublin Core to guarantee that metadata can satisfy needs of searching and browsing; selecting open standards and procedures to facilitate interoperability and preservation; and demonstrating a variety of interfaces, both 2D and 3D, along with exploring their usability.