DEFINITION OF AN ETD

Traditionally, a thesis/dissertation has consisted of a written document formatted and bound much like a book. But with the explosion of new computer technology, creative scholarly works now regularly incorporate features such as sound, video, graphics, and hypertext links or search tools, and many graduate students are finding that text-only theses/dissertations do not fully represent their work.

The ETD (Electronic Thesis/Dissertation) initiative is an effort to help graduate students create works of scholarship that are interactive, visually appealing, and readily accessible to a large audience of interested readers.

In the simplest terms, an ETD is a thesis/dissertation created as an electronic document (or set of electronic documents). The electronic documents that make up an ETD can be created using any popular word processing software program. One can also use advanced software programs to produce multimedia animations and sounds for use in an electronic version of a thesis/dissertation.

Like a paper-based thesis/dissertation, an ETD describes why the work was done, how the research relates to previous work, what research methods were used, and what was found, followed by an interpretation and discussion of the results.

If you are a graduate student and plan to create your thesis/dissertation using a PC, you will be creating an electronic thesis/dissertation. You can easily take the next step and publish your work on the web through this website.