Tom's points are well taken. Operating and ETD program is not
expensive (especially if you have OhioLINK ;-)), and the advantages
interms of access and storage it provides are overwhelming. ProQuest
does a fine job, but their dissertations must be purchased by all but
your own campus users, and this alone can lead to copyright problems.
In some cases we have had situations where material in the
dissertation could be disseminated free through OhioLINK, but not on
a for sale basis through ProQuest. Secondly, the copy quality is
limited, particularly when it comes to audio visual files embedded in
the document. In our situation, we are not providing as duplicate
collection, we are actually replacing our paper collection in the
Library, and releasing about 70 yards of shelf space per year in
doing so. Add to that the fact that many documents receive thousands
of hits per month, can be accessed through Google, etc., and contrast
that with the 1-3 times the average dissertation is taken off the
shelves in its life, and one can see the enormous advantages to major
research universities eager to make their scholarship as widely
available as possible.

As to the plagiarism issue, again I agree with Tom. The Xerox copier
has always been available, at least in recent years. I actually see
advantages in wider electronic dissemination over paper, in that the
more people read a document, the more likely someone is to spot
plagiarism. Add to that the fact that we can run such documents
through programs designed to search for plagiarism, such as
turnitin.com, and I think we are in a better, not worse, place.

William Clark

>Mike Neuman wrote:
>
>>  First, if UMI already constitutes a kind of union catalog of theses and
>>  dissertations, why should we spend scarce resources to provide a
>>  duplicative collection?
>
>What resources are prohibitively scarce?  Hardwarily, an ETD server can
>be a hand-me-down PC with its OS upgraded to (free) Linux.  You can do
>very well for yourself with free software.  In terms of staff time, if
>ETD management adds substantially to your workflow, I'd say you're
>reinventing too many wheels.
>
>
>You're talking with librarians?  In addition to the points you've
>already made: Ask them how much shelving space they'll need for the next
>20 years' worth of bound theses and dissertations--or for the last 20
>years' worth, if you want to consider retrospective conversion.  Do they
>have nothing else they'd like to do with that space?  Who pays for
>binding?  Ask them how big a relief it would be to know that no one
>could walk in and rip a few pages out of the only copy on campus in
>order to save time at the photocopier.  Ask them the average number of
>times any print dissertation is looked at, by anyone, in a given year
>(and then show them usage stats from ETD sites).  In other words, how
>much do they pay every year to house, maintain, and secure a paper
>collection, and how much does that come to, per use?
>
>
>Ask them to name any other branch of the scholarly literature that is so
>routinely unavailable to researchers except through paid document
>delivery (the majority of libraries will not send print dissertations
>through inter-library loan).  Ask them whether their researchers like
>downloading electronic journal articles to their desktops; if so, how
>much value is there in providing electronic dissertations to the desktop?
>
>
>Ask them what they tell patrons at the reference desk who rightly point
>out that they have online access to journal articles, conference papers,
>technical reports, patents, and even books in increasing numbers, but
>when they want a dissertation they're given UMI's phone number and told
>to crack out a credit card.
>
>>
>>  Second, what can be done to prevent downstream piracy and plagiarism of
>>  freely available dissertations in PDF format.  Granted that capability
>>  for manipulation is limited if the person getting access has only the
>>  Adobe plug-in, someone intent on misappropriation will have the full
>>  Adobe package to edit and re-purpose at will.  We clarified that placing
>>  a spurious version of the document in place of the original would not be
>>  possible, but there was still concern about the possibility of
>>  misappropriation . . . as is true for any publicly available electronic
>>  resource.  Does anyone have a convincing response to this concern?
>>
>
>Focus on the behavior, not the technology.  If I were intent on
>plagiarism and only had access to a bound dissertation, I think having
>to photocopy it, scan it, and run it through OCR would be only a
>medium-sized nuisance - or I'd just buy it from UMI.  It would certainly
>be faster and cheaper than writing the paper myself.
>
>I'm not an expert here, but wouldn't judicious use of the PDF security
>settings handle a lot of this?  If copy/paste operations were password
>protected, would that convince people?  (I've heard rumors that PDF
>security is hackable, but you've at least made it as cumbersome as the
>old photocopy/scan/OCR option.)
>
>
>--
>Thomas Dowling
>Ohio Library and Information Network
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--
William A. T. Clark
Associate Dean of the Graduate School
Professor, Materials Science & Engineering
250 University Hall
230 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210
Ph:  (614) 292-6031
Fax: (614) 292-3656
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