ETD2010 International Symposium

ETD2010 International Symposium

Between 16th and 18th of June this year in Austin (TX, USA) the Thirteenth International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertation ETD2010 was organized by NDLTD. On the symposium the representatives of scientific institutions from all over the world were exchanging experience related to popularization of the idea of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and also to collecting ETDs and making them available on-line. Main activities in this subject from USA, Canada, several countries from Central and South America and also Africa and Europe were presented.

The symposium had two keynote speeches. The first one, on opening of the symposium, was made by Larry Johnson (CEO, The New Media Consortium) and titled “Seven Channels of Change: How Technology is Unfolding, Everywhere We Look”. As the seven channels Larry Johnson numbered:

  • “Computing in Three Dimensions”
  • “Games Are Reality”
  • “Keyboards are for Older People”
  • “Users ARE the Content”
  • “Collective Intelligence is the New Knowledge”
  • “The People Are the Network”
  • “The network is everywhere”

Because of the location of this edition of the symposium, the majority of presentations was related to activities in the USA and neighboring countries, including prestigious universities like Stanford or Yale. European experiences were presented also by Agnieszka Lewandowska from PSNC. She described the aggregation of ETDs metadata from Polish digital libraries done by the Digital Libraries Federation and the process of transferring this metadata to the DART-Europe Portal. The presentations of the Polish achievements caused interest. The symposium participants have asked several questions, mostly regrading the organisational and technical aspects of the Federation, the rules for automated selection of object exposed for the DART-Europe and of course the directions of the DLF development.