WVU Has Over 1,000 ETDs

The West Virginia University Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) collection has now grown to over 1,000 documents.  Implemented as a requirement in August 1998, the ETD Initiative at WVU has several purposes, including helping students in their careers, assisting other learners and researchers, 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, and
  
  

• for technology and knowledge sharing to speed up, as graduate research results become more readily and more completely available.

Other notable collection statistics include:

• Over 235,000 total accesses to WVU ETDs since inception,
  

• Most popular ETD has been accessed over 13,000 times since January 2001,
  

• Growing number of multimedia submissions,
  

•  Over 62% are available world-wide on the Web (note:  campus restricted ETDs are still available through Inter-Library Loan request)

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