Two Approaches to Enhance the Education for ETDs: Developing Educational Modules and Migrating the ETD Guide into a Community Wiki

Abstract

Two efforts have been made by the Digital Library (DL) Curriculum Development Project Group (http://curric.dlib.vt.edu) to help the ETD community. Our first activity is the preparation of multiple educational modules, which may be combined to create DL courses. In a paper presented at ETD 2007, the group identified the modules that might be most useful for scholars' research endeavors (i.e., for ETD authors). Since then, five modules from the selected module list have been developed and a formal review by subject experts has been completed for two draft modules. In this paper, the project team will present the details of the five modules. They are: 3-b: Digitization; 4-b: Metadata; 6-b: Online information seeking behaviors and search strategies; 7-e: Web publishing (e.g., wiki, RSS, blogs); and 9-e: Intellectual property. The second portion of this paper describes the recent migration activity of the ETD Guide (etdguide.org), which was written by several authors, with support by UNESCO, into a local wiki server. The ETD Guide has been supporting scholars, who would like to know more about ETDs, and/or utilize NDLTD systems effectively. However, there were problems such as outdated information in some sections, and the lack of easy means to update the information in the Guide. To address those problems, a wiki-based version of ETD Guide has been created with updated information (http://curric.dlib.vt.edu/wiki/index.php/ETD_Guide). Our plan is to move it into wikibooks.org so that it could be exposed to an even larger community. It will allow the ETD community to update information on the Guide as new technologies and approaches arise related to ETDs. It is our hope that the efforts described will help with the understanding of digital libraries and of ETDs, and will promote the use of NDLTD-related systems and services.