First Announcement and Call for Papers ETD2003

[Susanne Dobratz <susanne.dobratz _at__ rz.hu-berlin.de>]

Wednesday, 07 August 2002

This email is sent to several email lists. Please apologize!


 First Announcement and Call for Papers ETD2003: Next Steps -
 Electronic Theses and Dissertations Worldwide


On behalf of Humboldt-University Berlin and NDLTD we would like to 
invite you to the "Sixth International Symposium On Electronic Theses 
and Dissertations" being held at the Humboldt-University in Berlin, 
Germany from 21st May until 24th May 2003.

The symposium is the 6th in a series of annual conferences organised by 
the "Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations" (NDLTD).

The NDLTD initiative, born in the USA, is an open federation of 
currently 149 member universities and supporting organisations, such as 
research institutions or private companies. NDLTD's activities are 
focused on universities, libraries, faculties, and graduate students in 
order to support authoring, indexing, archiving, dissemination, and 
retrieval of electronic theses and dissertations worldwide.

ETD2003 is the first conference that will take place outside the USA.

The event will be supported by the NDLTD steering committee, the UNESCO 
Information and Informatics Division, the German National Library (Die 
Deutsche Bibliothek) and DINI, the German Initiative for Networked 
Information.

The Scope of ETD2003 will not only be to demonstrate new developments in 
the field of electronic theses and dissertations but also to encourage 
even more universities around the world to become a part of NDLTD and to 
promote free access to scholarly electronic documents in the sense of 
the Budapest Open Access Initiative. (http://www.soros.org/openaccess)

The Berlin symposium will focus on establishing new cooperation and 
explore common approaches and challenges to the topic of scholarly 
electronic publishing especially of electronic theses and dissertations. 
It will also aim to raise awareness of the educational and service 
aspects and to describe current activities to progress thinking in this 
area.

Along the conference we plan to organise workshops covering special 
aspects as
- Use of XML, DTDs and Schemas,
- Workflows in Libraries,
- Strategic Planning for ETD Projects at Universities

For beginners we will offer tutorials for the following topics:
- How to start an ETD Programme
- OAI tools, standards, Formats for ETDs
Training the Trainers

We invite you to submit proposals that address any of the following or 
related issues.
. Training and author education issues
. Issues and challenges for libraries
. Long-term preservation of ETDs
. Technical standards and implementation strategies
. Multimedia applications: technical management and training
. Towards a global digital ETD library: networking and retrieval
. Examples, goals, possibilities and limitations of international 
cooperation
. Publisher's perspectives

If you are interested in giving a presentation, a tutorial or a talk 
within a workshop, or contribute a poster please submit your paper via 
the electronic submission page of the ETD2003 website at 
http://www.hu-berlin.de/etd2003/ until 15. January 2003. We expect 
abstracts with 100 - 300 words.

For questions, please contact: Dr. Peter Schirmbacher 
(schirmbacher _at__ rz.hu-berlin.de ) or Susanne Dobratz 
(dobratz _at__ rz.hu-berlin.de ).


We hope you will take part at this conference and find new ideas, 
friends, and sources for professional development and that ETD2003 will 
be a forum for all of us to shape and define our agenda for the 21st 
century.

We look forward to seeing you in May 2003. If you have queries please do 
not hesitate to contact the organisation committee at 
etd2003org _at__ rz.hu-berlin.de .

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Peter Schirmbacher
Chair ETD2003 Conference Organisation Committee