(Blacksburg, VA, October 4, 1999) -- Ed Fox, Virginia Tech computer science professor and director of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) and the Networked University Digital Libraries (NUDL), reports that "international buy-in" of NUDL and of electronic theses and dissertations has been "faster than I would have expected."
NDLTD has been growing steadily in the United States, since it was launched by Virginia Tech in 1996 (see www.ndltd.org and www.theses.org and http://etd.vt.edu). Although Virginia Tech ETDs (electronic theses and dissertations) receive 'hits' from around the world, contributions of documents from international institutions face challenges relating to language, character sets, and policies. While Fox is confident these will be overcome, he didn't think he was looking at the short-term.
But last October, after Fox presented a multimedia workshop in Bristol, England, UNESCO joined NDLTD; and over 27-28 September, UNESCO held a meeting in Paris to discuss an international strategy for disseminating ETD's (www.unesco.org/webworld/etd/). "UNESCO supports economic and social development. Technology transfer is necessary for economic development, and ETD's are an important resource for technology transfer," Fox explains.
Meanwhile, this summer at a conference in New Mexico sponsored by the NSF, ISTEC (Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium - www.istec.org), and the Organization of American States, Fox delivered a keynote lecture on developing digital libraries in South America. "Now ISTEC and OAS are on the NDLTD steering committee," he says. Fox will run a digital library training session at an OAS/ISTEC Digital Libraries Conference for Central America, to be held in Costa Rica in December. And future meetings are planned at other locations. "One initiative involves donation of computers and software to leading universities in South America," Fox reports.
In another development, the NSF digital library initiative and the NSF international program are collaborating with the German science agency (DFG), which has a national project on theses and dissertations led by Humboldt University. An NSF grant to Virginia Tech will facilitate German-US collaboration so that ETDs can be easily located and shared across the two countries.
Fox has also been giving talks about digital libraries in Germany, Croatia, Taiwan, and Japan, and putting together proposals for solving the technical difficulties of sharing international research. "For example, we want to look at whether we can use machine translation of abstracts to make ETD's at least semi-available by letting people know something of the content," Fox suggests.
One agency particularly interested in such efforts is in the United States -- the Center for Research Libraries, which has 750,000 foreign dissertations. "They are the U.S. depository of this tremendous resource, which is not even cataloged by subject. You need to know an author's name to request a work. So they would like to see if we can collaborate to help expand their services, both in quantity and quality," says Fox.