[July 04, 2000] "The Virginia Tech Graduate School requires a specific form for the submission of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) to maintain the consistency of these complex documents. The formal statement of these guidelines serves graduate students submitting ETDs, the faculty with whom they work, and scholars who study the submitted ETDs. We defined a Document Type Definition (DTD) in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) for the representation of ETDs, a logical choice for encoding complex electronic documents. To build the DTD, we analyzed constructs in existing theses and dissertations and studied the rules for their submission. Here we present definitions, annotations, and rationale for each document construct, and we explain the connection of the document constructs into an integrated DTD. The result is the description of the grammar of a new document language, the Electronic Thesis and Dissertaton Markup Language, or ETD-ML."

Various 'ETD' XML DTDs have been produced at the University of Iowa, University of Michigan, etc. In some cases, there is a strong dependence upon TEI.

References:

• Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Markup Language. Version 2: Document Type Definition. By Neill Kipp, Zaodat Rahman, and Marc Bjorklund (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). [cache]

• NDLTD and XML

• ETD-ML (SGML)

• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

• Documentation

• User Guide

• Beyond the Paper Paradigm: XML and the Case for Markup."

• See: "Digital Alchemy: Research, Writing, and Rendition- XML ETD's at the University of Iowa By John Robert Gardner (ATLA-CERTR, Emory University).

• See: Thesis and Dissertation Markup (TDM) - Project Electronic Thesis and Dissertation XML Pilot. [cache]

• A Pilot for Evaluating a Possible Procedure for Acceptance of Extensible Markup Language (XML). By John Robert Gardner.

• See: Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Project

• See: Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Additional Materials