Guest Speaker to Present 'ETDs in India'

Dr. Sumant Goel, executive director of The Digital Dissertation Foundation (DDF) will visit the West Virginia University Libraries at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25, to present a talk “ETDs:  India Needs to March Ahead” in the Downtown Campus Library's Large Group Viewing Room 104; a reception will follow in the Wise Library’s Robinson Reading Room.

Dr. Goel and his wife Dr. Beena Goel, both dentists, established The Health Care Trust (HCT), a charity in Belgaum India to serve the rural population by providing access to healthcare education and treatment.  The DDF, an institute of HCT is a consortium of university faculty with the common goal to implement ETD (electronic thesis and dissertation) programs throughout India.

The University Libraries invited the Goels to visit WVU to learn about the University's ETD projects.  WVU and the DDF are members of The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, an international consortium.

The DDF will host a pilot program to offer online distribution of ETDs in the area of medical and allied subjects.  In the Goel's Indian state of Karnataka, over 1,000 theses are produced each year in the medical and dental fields.  There are approximately 50,000 dentists in India, with over 14,000 new dentists produced each year.  However, among the nearly 200 dental schools there are poorly controlled standards and only a handful of national scholarly dental journals exist to serve a growing population of over 1 billion.

The Goels hope to improve the quality of life for the average citizen, of which 70% live in small villages.  The implementation of ETD programs promotes open access of scholarly communications that in turn leads to improved academic standards.

The Digital Dissertation Foundation's Web site is  http://www.healthmantra.com/ddf/

For additional information contact John H. Hagen of the University Libraries at John.Hagen@mail.wvu.edu        

Released October 20, 2005
John.Hagen@mail.wvu.edu