A Practice and Value Proposal for Doctoral Dissertation Data Curation

• Main Authors: W. Aaron Collie, Michael Witt
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Edinburgh 2011-10-01
• Series: International Journal of Digital Curation
• Online Access: http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/189

The preparation and publication of dissertations can be viewed as a subsystem of scholarly communication, and the treatment of data that support doctoral research can be mapped in a very controlled manner to the data curation lifecycle. Dissertation datasets represent “low-hanging fruit” for universities who are developing institutional data collections. The current workflow for processing electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) at a typical American university is presented, and a new practice is proposed that includes datasets in the process of formulating, awarding, and disseminating dissertations in a way that enables them to be linked and curated together. The value proposition and new roles for the university and its student-authors, faculty, graduate programs and librarians are explored.