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I've never been much of a note-taker. At uni I tended to use the
subliminal absorption method in lectures. That is, sit there, while
doodling designs for cycle panniers or tents, or writing the name of a
certain young woman over and over in as close as I could manage to
Helvetica font and try to stay awake after finishing my taxi shift at
3am and hope that something sinks in even if I do doze off a bit. I'm
not apologizing. Seems to have worked so far for me.
So, I'm not equipped with the notes or the disposition to be able to
give a [blow-by-blow of the ETD
conference](http://metalogger.wordpress.com/tag/e-theses-and-etd-conference/)
the way RUBRIC's Neil Godfrey has done, but I will offer my impressions
of the two ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) conferences that I
have attended.
# ETD 2005
I attended the ETD conference in Sydney in 2005, with Deidre Lowe, but
apparently I didn't blog anything, probably because we were waiting for
confirmation of the [RUBRIC](http://rubric.edu.au/) project to come
through and we were keeping it low-key. My recollection of that
conference is that it was a good introduction not only to the idea of
electronic theses, but also to the world of repositories. And I got
large, but not fatal dose of Open Access evangelism, because Stevan
Harnad was there enthusiastically and persuasively [Maximising research
impact by mandating institutional
self-archiving](ttp://adt.caul.edu.au/etd2005/papers/143harnad.pdf).
But the thing that struck me most was that just about everyone in 2005
seemed to be resigned to putting PDF into their repositories. There was
a group from Humbolt University in Germany talking about XML, and a
couple of other mentions for XML, but none of them had worked out how to
put authoring tools into the hands of large numbers of authors and
automate the publishing process. You can look in the references to [my
paper for ETD 2007](http://eprints.usq.edu.au/archive/00002653/) for
further reading.
# ETD 2007
I was itching to get back to this community and show them what we can
achieve with ICE – which I did at
ETD 2007.
But what about the rest of ETD 2007?
The thing that I picked up, mainly from the plenary sessions, is that
there is an increasing amount of attention being paid to e-scholarship,
or e-research.
[Neil Godfrey
blogged](http://metalogger.wordpress.com/2007/06/28/etd-uppsala-conference-update-5/)
about Greg Crane's presentation on e-scholarship in the humanities:
> Greg Crane spoke of the need and inevitability of moving beyond
> book-imitation pdf files. He used [Peseus Classics
> Online](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/) as an example of the potential
> we should be aiming towards —
> where texts contain multiple links for each word class="spCh spChx2014">— to dictionaries, to other related
> texts, to commentaries. The potential impact will move us beyond the
> slow and limited intake of information that comes currently from
> reading lines at a time, then moving on to other texts class="spCh spChx2026">…. a 2 dimensional process as opposed to
> the 3 dimensional or more organic structure possible with the sort of
> thing we now see at Perseus.
>
> I don’t know the technical
> structure behind Perseus, but I know Perseus well enough to see it as
> one model for a future online database class="spCh spChx2014">— and as for metadata implications, what
> it is calling for is work on ontologies and the semantic web (i
> suspect perseus is not based on that at present but i could be wrong
> — and I see Greg has an article
> online discussing this Perseus project in more depth that I must read)
> — and that means RDF ideally
> rather than traditional schema such as MODS or MARC or DC. class="spCh spChx2014">— though the RDF structured content
> could generate such schema when needed. (My thoughts arising from
> Greg’s presentation.)
>
> <http://metalogger.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/thesis-types-in-repositories/>
There was also Peter Murray Rust's [tour of some collisions between
e-science and
publishing](http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=366).
From my point of view there were more issues raised in the e-scholarship
that questions answered. These are my questions. Things I'm thinking
actively thinking about and experimenting with at the moment:
- What is the relationship between research data, classical texts,
source materials etc and publications derived from those data?
- Which kinds of data should go into institutional repositories? Which
kinds should not?
- How do we identify and refer to all the bits and pieces involved
over time as they are created, edited, published revised and
archived?
- What's the relationship between print and online hypertextual
delivery?
- How can we help research communities to manage their data for access
and preservation? (They don't necessarily do it all that well by
themselves, but it can be hard to tell people that)
- How can we help researchers to choose and configure tools?
A lot of the issues look like the sorts of things that we deal with in
the ICE project; instead of dumpling Microsoft word on the desktop, like
a typical ICT department, and leaving people to suffer, we can help them
to use it productively so they get more out of their time and their
work.
In contrast to some e-Research meetings where things tend to be
discussed a policy level only, without real-life examples, one of the
good things about the ETD conference is that it features lots of down to
earth basic implementation stories, including a set of awards for ETDs.
For example, there was presentation on how to embed video in a PDF file.
I didn't say anything at the time, but I think that this is a
particularly bad idea – it's not
likely to be usable even in the short term because it is so fragile
regarding codecs and platforms and over time it will have huge
preservation problems, not to mention usability. I'd prefer to see this
addressed along the lines of the way I tackled in in my paper, which
looked at how multimedia objects might be managed with appropriate
renditions for print and online versions of the work.
But the point is that people are there presenting stuff about real
things they have tried, however modest, which is a great strength for
the conference series.