Aims - developments - preferences

In Germany, scientific institutions, universities, libraries and others continually support the development of a national library ETD system for several years now. The plentiful experiences that have been won during that process will be introduced and chronologically summarized. Since the German National Library, Die Deutsche Bibliothek, shares an active part within that process, the ETD related efforts of Die Deutsche Bibliothek in special will be presented. These efforts can be described by addressing three major subjects that are discussed in the tutorial. First, it will describe the process and functional and technical aims that have been developed by Die Deutsche Bibliothek to archive online dissertations. The various stages of the workflow between authors, university libraries and Die Deutsche Bibliothek are described. Second, the tutorial will explain the various problems that are related to the format the online dissertations are made of. Advantages and disadvantages of the different format types and reasons for preferences will be mentioned. Third, the tutorial will address the role of persistent identifiers (PI) as an aspect to ensure the long-term availability and permanent referencing of all online dissertations and especially highlight the practicability of URN. The URN workflow and further PI related activities at Die Deutsche Bibliothek will be described.Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, ETD2003, 20.05.2003 - 24.05.2003, Humboldt-Universität zu Berli