A Practice and Value Proposal for Doctoral Dissertation Data Curation
The preparation and publication of dissertations can be viewed as a subsystem of scholarly communication, and the treatment of data that support doctoral research can be mapped in a very controlled manner to the data curation lifecycle. Dissertation datasets represent "low hanging fruit" for universities who are developing institutional data collections. The current workflow for processing electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) at a typical American university is presented, and a new practice is proposed that includes datasets in the process of formulating, awarding, and disseminating dissertations in a way that enables them to be linked and curated together. The value proposition and new roles for the university and its student authors, faculty, graduate programs and librarians are explored.
Int. J. Digit. Curation