ETDs at Humboldt-University at Berlin.

In Germany, university libraries have the duty to collect the dissertations from their own students and the German National Library is obliged by law to collect all paper based German dissertations. In addition to this there was a project entitled ‘Dissertation Online’ which finished in 2001 and attempted to make available the dissertations online. By 2003, there were 10,173 electronic dissertations in Germany. A student in Germany can publish in most universities electronically. In average, 16% of the students publish electronically and in some particular universities it is upto 25%. Electronic publishing gives a chance of higher quality and quantity of retrieval. One of the biggest problems of electronic publishing is long term archiving of documents. Other problems faced by Humboldt University were i) storage media: there were no experience about the long term, and what is the right media, tape or CD-ROM or any other? ii) the file format: the recommended format were XML or SGML but there were not enough tools to convert to XML from other formats like MS-Word, Word Perfect, LateX or StarOffice. 

Schirmbacher, P (2003). Electronic theses and dissertations and the necessity of a new culture of electronic publishing: ETDs at Humboldt-University at Berlin. Retrieved July 21, 2010 from http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/conferences/etd2003/schirmbacher-peter/PDF/index.pdf.