Electronic dissertations in the Netherlands

Abstract

Several Dutch university libraries started full text electronic storing and publishing of scholarly information during the first half of the nineties; they aimed to build up collections of full text digital information and to develop digital user services. Doing so, they wanted to acquire expertise in the areas of producing, converting, indexing and providing electronic documents. The University of Groningen decided to concentrate in the first instance on dissertations (and other university publications), because these documents are quality controlled and free of copyright. At this university each year about 200 dissertations are submitted in all kind of disciplines. From January 1994 Ph D. students were allowed to present an electronic version of their dissertation to the University Library Groningen for interlibrary exchange instead of 50 printed copies. Supporting a multiformat platform, the Groningen University Library allowed authors to decide in what document format they want to present their theses. WORD, WORDPERFECT and LATEX proved to be the most common used word processors. In a leaflet authors were informed which requirements they had to fullfill. The most important requirement is that the document should be completely electronic. To teach scientists, students and researchers how to produce electronic publications, the Computing Centre of the University organised several courses. Besides, the Computing Centre and the University Library were prepared to give those who had problems the necessary instructions and help. At the beginning, each electronic dissertation was stored on a document server in POSTSCRIPT format, together with ASCII versions of the bibliographical data, the summary and the table of contents. Soon afterwards PDF and HTML became de facto standards. For that reason, some years later the title page and the table of contents of the dissertations of the Groningen University are converted to HTML and the fulltext in PDF.