Within the Libraries and Archives of many Universities there lies and enormous stockpile of information from some very unique studies conducted by students. This information is in the form of hard-copy theses and dissertations (TDs). Until it is released in the electronic form the information and studies will remain hidden from other students, organisations and companies that are conducting the same or similar type of study. Until these TDs are retrospectively converted into ETDs then the information will remain locked away.

One benefit of Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETDs) is a reduction in the needless repetition of investigations that are carried out because people are unaware of the findings of other students who have completed a Thesis or Dissertation. Except in unusual cases, masters’ theses are rarely reported in databases.

Thus, students and student works will become more visible, facilitating advances in scholarship and leading to increased collaboration, each made possible by electronic communication, across space and time.

It is clear that most universities will have digital library efforts as part of, or in addition to, conventional library efforts. Digital libraries are of particular value when distance education is involved, or when a university has a number of remote campuses. These universities can promote more flexible access to information (eg. 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, from home or office, with no issue of the works already being borrowed or loaned).

As more and more TDs become available as ETDs at universities, more and more students, public and organisations will draw upon the emerging digital library of ETDs. This will make it easier for people to learn of the work of similar investigations. Contact with original author is quite feasible since the ETDs may include e-mail addresses and other contact information. Once contact is made, it is possible to have further discussion of references, application of methodologies, reuse of data-sets, and extension of prior work, as well as investigation of remaining open problems. This may lead to friendships, collaborations, joint publications, joint ventures and other benefits. Such may expand beyond student-student relationships to also include faculty, groups, laboratory teams, businesses and the general community.

The time has come to unlock the information that has been stored for too long in the university archives and libraries. Start your retrospective conversion process today, starting with the most popular Theses and Dissertations and slowly converting them all. Some are not accessed because no-one knows anything about them. You can recover your costs by charging for down-loads of the converted Theses & Dissertations.

There are two popular processes for converting the hard-copy DTs:

1. Book Scanning
2. Film-Based Imaging

Book Scanning - requires the use of a planetary scanner that is fitted with a book cradle to prevent any damage to the spine of the original book. The planetary scanner must be able to either eliminate or reduce the effect of book curvature that results in text distortion near the book spine. There is a requirement that the scanner removes the "thumb print" which is the device holding the page in place (sometimes a person's thumb). The main issue is to achieve a clean and very sharp picture of the text and thus enable the document to be easily read. The issue with document scanners is they convert everything into pixel information or dots per inch. This does not produce clean lines for text or Asian characters and usually requires image enhancement to clean the image. Even today companies like Kodak and Canon and investing research and developments funds on processes to enable the production of "picture perfect" images from scanners so they replicate the clarity of the original analogue camera.

Film-Base Imaging - this is a process by which the book is filmed using 35mm microfilm camera (usually an MRD) that enables the control of the focal length while maintaining high definition. The beauty of the camera photograph is the high line definition that is a mandatory requirement when dealing with Asian character sets. The film is then digitised using a Wicks & Wilson roll film scanner that produces incredibly clean images. The result is the TD is now preserved in film and easily accessible via the electronic images.

The resultant images can be converted using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to enable full text searching in the background while displaying the original image. The cleaner the original images the better the result from OCR. The OCR process is highly utilised when images are converted to Portable Document Format (PDF) document as the OCR'ed text is never seen by the user only the original text.

The converted Theses and Dissertations can be deposited into your local and/or national database allowing easy access by everyone not just the selected few.

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George has 20+ years knowledge and experience with the conversion of any media type into electronic format. http://www.gosmicro.com.au

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