1.2.2.
Improve visibility, Edward Fox
Once ETDs are collected on behalf of educational
institutions, digital library technology makes it easy for works to be
found. Through http://www.theses.org/,
NDLTD directly makes ETDs available, and points to other services that
facilitate such discovery. As a result, hundreds or thousands of accesses per
year per work are logged, for example, according to reports from the Virginia
Tech library regarding the ETDs it makes publicly accessible. As the collection
of available ETDs grows and reaches critical mass, it is likely that it will be
frequently consulted by the millions of researchers and graduate students
interested in such detailed studies, expositions of new methodologies, reviews
of the literature on specialized topics, extensive bibliographies, illustrative
figures and tables, and highly expressive multimedia supplements. 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.