Over 1 Million WVU ETDs Served

The West Virginia University Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) collection documents have now been accessed over 1.4 million times since inception.

Implemented as a requirement in August 1998, the ETD Initiative at WVU has several purposes, including helping students promote their careers, assisting learners and researchers within and external to WVU, and making available many scholarly works that were previously inaccessible.

The main program goals we have been successfully achieving are:

• for graduate students to learn about electronic publishing and digital libraries and to apply that knowledge as they engage in their research and build and submit their own ETDs for distribution on the Web

• for universities to learn about digital libraries, as they collect, catalog, archive, and make ETDs accessible to scholars worldwide

• for universities to learn how to unlock the potential of their intellectual property and products

• for graduate education to improve through more effective sharing

• for timely sharing of technology, knowledge and peer review

Other notable collection statistics include:

• WVU ETDs are accessed 145,000 times more than their printed counterparts

• There are over 1,100 documents are currently in the WVU ETD collection

• The most popular WVU ETD has been accessed over 13,000 times since January 2001

• WVU ETDs are accessed in over 93 countries worldwide

• There are a growing number of interesting WVU ETD multimedia submissions

•  Over 62% of WVU ETDs are available worldwide on the Web (Note:  Campus-restricted ETDs are still available through the Inter-Library Loan program).

Additional program information and collection access can be found at http://www.wvu.edu/~thesis/ or by contacting John H. Hagen of the University Libraries at John.Hagen@mail.wvu.edu 

        

Revised 27 September 2004
John.Hagen@mail.wvu.edu