Call for Proposals - USETDA 2018 Conference
John Hagen
Dear Colleague,
We'd like to hear about your ETD program developments as well as graduate school and library processes, best practices, workflows, standards and innovations supporting your scholarly communications endeavors in graduate education. Below you will find a variety of topics covering research practices, streamlining of ETD processing and the impact of ETDs. We invite you to submit your proposal for a presentation, paper, poster, workshop or panel discussion.
USETDA 2018 - Call for Proposals
The US Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USETDA) will hold their 8th annual conference, “USETDA 2018” at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Denver, Colorado from September 12-14, 2018, hosted by the Auraria Library and Brigham Young University. We invite graduate school, library and information technology professionals to submit proposals for presentations, panel sessions, workshops and posters.
Deadline: Proposals should be submitted on or before March 2, 2018 to be considered.
Audience:
USETDA 2018 will provide excellent educational opportunities for professionals from graduate schools, libraries, academic computing and others who work with electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), institutional repositories, graduate students and scholarly communications. Our goal is to offer relevant, practice-oriented content to support ETD productivity improvement, ETD professionals, advance ETD operations and encourage the formation of regional ETD associations and networking communities as well as to provide useful and innovative resources, standards, and technology for the development and support of ETD programs. Proposals are welcome from library, graduate school and information technology professionals, graduate students and faculty as well as library and information systems / services representatives.
Theme:
The conference theme “Climbing Ever Higher - Summit on Scholarly Communications in Graduate Education” will focus on the impact and implications of connecting scholars and research from across the country and around the world. We will examine the present use and availability of ETDs and related initiatives while also exploring new and emerging ETD practices, needs, and influences impacting administrative, graduate school and library professionals.
Presentation proposals should reflect one or more of the following three subtopics. Presenters are encouraged to use the examples under the subtopics as inspiration, but are not limited to these ideas and can expand upon them or generate new ones based on the subtopic themes.
I. Research Practices
- Philosophical perspectives from graduate school professionals on copyright, fair use and creative works
- Data sharing – researchers sharing their data within their research groups and with other researchers (e.g., figshare.com)
- Connecting research and researchers through ORCID or other persistent digital identifiers
- Nontraditional ETDs and scholars
- Collaborative efforts by students
- Intellectual property: copyright, patent, prior publication issues related to repository access policies, review processes and educational outreach programs
- Council of Graduate Schools discussion group / panel discussion
- The evolving definition of a doctorate and the future of dissertations
- Trends in scholarly communication
II. Streamlining ETD Processing
- Best practices – graduate school and library workflows
- Collaborative initiatives between graduate schools and libraries
- Preparation of ETDs – providing students with skills they can use in their future professions
- Utilizing technology better to improve ETD programs
- Better ways to do ETD reviewing (graduate school and library processes)
- Format review
- Approval and submission
- Signature sheet methods and solutions (physical vs digital / checklist item vs Adobe e-signature, etc.)
- Technologies and systems
- Technical considerations and workflow models related to the examination and preservation of novel dissertation forms for non-pdf/digital dissertation deposit and preservation
- Institutional Repository / ETD systems, developments and innovations
- Data curation, management and long-term preservation – campus policies and programs
- Student support and training
- Cataloging and metadata conventions and innovations
- ETD user group meetings
III. The Impact of ETDs
- Disseminating ETDs
- Creative writing and ETDs
- Tracking “citation” data for ETDs
- Promoting ETDs/research through Three Minute Thesis, social media, and similar initiatives
- Enriching the ETD final submission record (including summary video, data files, metadata, etc.)
- Collecting and using statistics about ETD use (e.g., from your IR, Altmetric, Impactstory, PlumX, etc.); benefits of promoting ETDs to the institution, academic program, student
- Case studies of graduate work completed in novel, digital formats, e.g., museum exhibit, sound recording, website, 3D modeling, mapping
- Promoting open access among graduate students and faculty
- “Life of ETD research beyond graduation” – Case studies on post ETD publications based on ETD research including practices in various fields and students’ plans to use their ETD for articles, books, or just as a platform for future research
The For complete information and to submit your proposal visit the Call for Proposals Webpage at http://www.ocs.usetda.org/index.php/USETDA/USETDA2018/schedConf/cfp .
