Case Western Reserve University graduate students who defend theirdissertations this year will have a new, cutting-edge option to submit and publish their expositions electronically.

The university is at the forefront of what is quickly becoming the national standard as one of only four universities in the country currently offering students this Web-based electronic dissertation service made available from Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based ProQuest, a company that publishes nearly 55,000 dissertations and master's theses each year.

"Nearly every North American research university sends its graduate students' work to ProQuests's UMI repository, formerly known as University Microfilms, but only a small percentage are submitted in an electronic format," said Timothy Robson, deputy director of the University Library, who, with library Director Joanne Eustis, has been instrumental in bringing the service to Case.

Electronic dissertations offer students an alternative to submitting two print copies of their expositions to the university for binding and storage, and the service is available at no additional cost to students or graduate schools. The option also enables students to embed databases and multimedia, like audio and video files, into their works.

In addition to making the publishing of dissertation and thesis materials easier for graduate students at the end of a long degree process, the new technology also quickens the graduate school's final review process.

"The new electronic publishing option will cut at least one-half the time it takes to turn around a hardbound copy and probably closer to two-thirds of the binding and library processing time," Robson said. "This new feature will save the students, graduate schools and university money over time and doesn't affect any other part of the advanced degree process."

The new electronic dissertation service saves space as well as time and money. Robson said that the University Library historically has received several hundred hardbound dissertations and master's theses a year, and physical storage space has run out.

With the new technology, Case students upload an approved dissertation to a server through the Internet by simply copying and pasting the abstract and then transmitting the entire exposition automatically after its conversion into an Adobe PDF file.

Complete instructions are available at http://www.case.edu/provost/gradstudies/etd.

Return to the online edition of the 1-29-04 Campus News.