Dr. Judith Edminster: Tracing the Diffusion of Multimedia Scholarship/Publication in Academe

I first began my inquiry into the mission and goals of the Networked Digital Library of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) as a graduate student in the Spring of 1999. My dissertation committee chair had received a grant from Microsoft to study how Frontpage, an early web editor program, could assist graduate student researchers in creating multimodal theses and dissertations in HTML, which could then be published online for worldwide access. The story of how the NDLTD came into partnership with University Microfilm International (UMI—now Proquest) to provide worldwide access to hundreds of thousands of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in multiple languages from across the globe can be found here at this site, published both in my own downloadable 2002 dissertation, and in my audio file interview of Delphine Lewis of UMI.

What follows are several audio file interviews I undertook of graduate students and international archival librarians, from 2002 through 2009. The subjects of the graduate student interviews are their processes of creating a multimodal thesis or dissertation and the challenges they faced—often from their own professors and institutions. The subjects of the international university librarian interviews are their processes of providing access to and preserving ETDs (both text-only and multimodal) and the challenges they face. These files can be either downloaded, or streamed directly from this site.

I took the photographs that appear above at the archives of the University of Humboldt in Berlin, Germany, in 2003. The one on the left shows an array of booklets, none more than 25 pages, printed in Latin between 1800 and 1820. They are some of the first graduate student dissertations ever written. The one on the right shows an early attempt at creating a multimodal dissertation.

Dr. Judith Edminster's 2002 dissertation The Diffusion of New Media Scholarship: Power, Innovation and Resistance in Academe