Electronic dissertations

Abstract

In Germany PhD students have to submit 80-100 copies of their dissertations. This means a substantial expense for the students, and also for the university and its library, because the dissertation copies should be processed and stored. To avoid this burden, the rules of PhD examinations have been changed so that the dissertations could be submitted in electronic form. The new tasks related with the actual problems and handling of electronic dissertations are discussed. The challenges in-clude those that have emerged with changed ex-amination rules, copyright issues, changed formats, problems with storage, availability and retrieval It was found out when traditional and electronic formats were compared that the electronic formats have been searched more intensively than the traditional ones. The restrictions of availability, library work processes and problems of use are alsó considered. For librarians, the main problems are retrieval and the so-called document description scheme.