ABSTRACT
Although copies of theses and dissertations have long been available to researchers through interlibrary loan services or through such commercial services as Bell and Howell Learning Company (formerly known as University Microforms International, or UMI), online publication of these works makes them quicker and easier to search and access. As a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education says, “scholarship stands to gain as it becomes easier for more scholars to read the latest dissertations and theses.” (1) For instance, Virginia Tech’s Scholarly Communications Project, with over 2800 electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), published on its site as of 2001, boasts some ETDs that have already received thousands of hits (or visits). (2) Obviously, few paper Ph.D. or master’s theses receive this kind of attention. Increased accessibility means that more and more of these works may actually be read, which, in turn, “is going to make us pay more attention to the quality of what gets in our dissertations.” (3)
Many graduate departments and committees remain conservative, however; even those scholars who take advantage of electronic formats must produce work that will be approved by their graduate committees. It is unlikely, therefore, that the institution of hypertext ETDs will effect radical change in the substance or the form of these works in the near future. Graduate schools have long provided guidelines for formatting theses and dissertations along very traditional lines, and scholars have come to depend on these traditional formats to help determine the authority of a given text. Sloppy formatting may often be equated-consciously or not-with sloppy thinking. However, for the most part, these formats were developed for print publication. To date, no standards for producing and formatting electronic documents have been agreed upon. One source that is attempting to help formulate such guidelines for electronic publications is The Columbia Guide to Online Style, which argues, “If the production and dissemination of online academic writing is truly to redefine scholarship, it must first successfully negotiate a transitional period of legitimization…. Standardization of online style is a necessary first step in negotiating this transition.” (4)
Developing standards for how to cite ETDs published electronically-on the World Wide Web, on CD-ROM, via UMI, or other electronic forms-is,
therefore, one step toward authorizing these important works of scholarship. Moreover, students producing ETDs also need guidelines for documenting sources used in producing electronic scholarship, guidelines that make sense for online publication and acknowledge the differences between writing for print and writing for electronic distribution. In addition to standards for citation of ETDs in print scholarship, authors of ETDs may need to cite graphics, links, video and audio files, frames, document information screens, document source code, other ETDs, or whatever elements they may include that have not been addressed by any of the major documentation styles. In this chapter, I present some suggestions for how to cite electronic sources based on Columbia Online Style (COS) as presented in The Columbia Guide to Online Style by the author and Todd Taylor, as well as some suggestions for ways that authors of ETDs and other forms of electronic scholarship can handle links to volatile electronically published sources that may be prone to appearing, disappearing, or morphing at a moment’s notice (or less).
