COLLOQUY Responses
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COLLOQUY Responses
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 I whole-heartedly endorse the concept of publication of theses and dissertations on the Web. At a minimum, these publications have been "refereed" by the student's graduate supervisory committee, so this is not a totally unsupervised release of information. An electronically published thesis is not inherently of lower quality than a traditionally printed and bound thesis (that moulders unread on a university library shelf), since both are approved by the students graduate supervisory committee. However, the electronically published thesis is likely to be read by many more people because of easy access to it via the Internet. In that manner a badly done, and sloppily supervised, electronically published thesis may be more widely circulated, but it also would be more widely available to potential critics -- something that should keep a graduate supervisory committee on its toes. As far as finding the information goes, I have no doubt once Web publication of theses and dissertations becomes commonplace, someone will index them and make access to that index freely available. Much of the web is already indexed in this manner through resources such as Yahoo, Lycos, or Altavista. Once located, the information in an electronically published thesis is available more quickly, and at less cost, than under the present arrangement with UMI. I believe that many who object to electronic publication either are simply uncomfortable with this new, rapidly changing (and somewhat uncontrolled) medium, or they have a significant vested interest in existing print publications. This is not to say that those truly concerned about quality assurance do not have a valid issue. However, I feel that the advantages of widespread dissemination of knowledge far outweigh those concerns.
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