 As what I was saying, I don't know if anyone heard this before. We're looking at this session as more, less a presentation. I do have some slides and I'm going to be talking about them, but this is going to be more interactive. It's going to be a lot more talking to, talk of like hearing from you. We're going to tell you a little bit about ourselves, just so you're clear on what our group is. We would love to have you if this is, if this group sounds like something you'd be interested in. Absolutely. Please join us. Again, we'll tell you more about it. In the chat section, I've put my email address. So if you would like to be on the mailing list, please just email me and I'll be happy to add you. We also have a group page. It's a Google, share Google doc. That link is in the, that link is in the chat. And finally, we do have monthly meetings. It's the third Wednesday of each month at 2pm Eastern time. It's Zoom evening. And if you'd like to join us, we're open to everybody whether you're on the mailing list or not. Okay. So anyone has any questions, please ask in chat. Or if you feel, if you feel comfortable, please feel free to just speak up. So anyone have any questions before we get started? Actually, before we get started, my name is Sally Evans. I'm the coordinator of university dissertation and thesis services at George Mason University. I'm also a USCTDA board member. And I'm going to be talking to you today. Well, I'm going to be showing you slides today about our formatting industry. Anyone have any questions? Let me know. One second. This is kind of weird. I'm getting used to hop in. This is the first time I've really used it. And I'm real. I don't know if I can see chats while I'm doing a presentation. I don't know that I can. Okay. So can you all see my slides? Yeah. Good. Good. Okay. Yeah. So I might be doing this wrong. There may be a better way to do it, but I unfortunately cannot see chats right now. So if someone knows how to do that, I'm just not noticing. So before we get into anything else. Is there anybody out there who's having issues with issues in their job? If they're having specific challenges or problems, we would love to hear from you. So whether that is about specifically formatting or processes, et cetera. If you'd like to share in chat. Stacey, if I could ask you to look at either chat or Q&A because I can't see it because I have slide up. If anyone would like to share in chat or Q&A or absolutely please unmute and ask. We would love to hear from you because this is again, not a presentation. This is a talk. Anybody? I'd like to say something. It's really not a problem for us, but it was mentioned in one of our meetings in the past week or so. I think Larry brought it up about. So in the old world, we went from paper now to electronic. Everything had to be double spaced. And now some people are saying, you know, that's outdated. You should use single space. And I actually did some research, tried to do some research in a Google research. Is that what we all do to see if I can find any articles, subjects that I really couldn't find much. If I wanted to say, here's the research that says it's really better to read in, you know, single space because that's what journals are doing, whatever. I know we can come out and say, this is what others are doing. But I think it'd be great if anybody knows where there's some really solid research to back up when we want to present changes to our schools or our universities or our rules or formatting rules. Yeah, no, that's great. And that's great, Janice. That is something we have talked about in a limited capacity. That's not the right way to put it. We've talked about it in our group, and it's something that we've discussed a little bit, obviously, but I think really merits looking into it further from this point. I think it would benefit all of us. So thank you. Anyone else, any other issues you'd like to share, challenges, questions you're having right now? Sally, can you click on hide? There's a notice that says you're sharing your screen, but you can click on it where it says hide. Oh, right there. Okay. Okay, I clicked hide. There. Now we can see your captioning. There we go, jerks. Okay. No, you're not jerks. I'm angry with you. Okay. All right. Thank you. So anybody else, any other, any challenges, questions, et cetera? Hi, this is Terry. Can you hear me? Yeah. Hi, Terry. I'm following up on what Janice was talking about. It's occurred to me because I've often looked like, should we be using serif instead of sans serif font, et cetera. And since I think the guidelines that I would follow would be for accessibility, right? And so the majority of folks are reading, you know, articles and ETDs online. And so what produces the most accessible and best reader experience? Regardless of whether or not, you know, they're using a screen reader, just a simple act of reading online is really very different from print. And so that's what I would look at. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good point. Do you have a point on the chat to talk about accessibility because it seems like a lot of consideration. You're kind of breaking up, Stacey. Yeah. It's, yeah, they're friends. And we were a little crackly moments today. Okay. So if anyone else, if no one else has anything that they'd like to share, I'd like to tell you a little bit more about our group and then we can open it up for further discussion or questions. So I don't know about you, but I know that a lot of the people who are in the group now and a lot of people we speak to at our conference are kind of in the same boat that I'm in. Often we wear a whole lot of different hats. So at your job, do you ever feel that if no one at your institution gets you, you're either surrounded by a bunch of librarians who are talking about metadata or access services or cataloging and you say, ah, you know, I had to meet with students today because they just can't get the table of contents and they just stare at you. And you may even know what they're talking about, but they have no idea, you may know what they're talking about, but they have no idea what you're talking about. Do you have problems or issues in your position that nobody around you seems to understand or care about? You have daily issues, you need help, but your people have no idea what you're talking about or they just don't care. And finally, do you despair of ever fixing your latex template? I do. So if you're suffering from any of these issues or anything similar, the USETDA formatting users group is here to help. So Sally, there is something in the Q&A. Okay, great. If you don't mind reading it to me. Happy to. It's from Roxanne. We are currently dealing with an issue of whether to have separate formatting requirements for monograph and multi-paper format thesis and dissertations. Oh, that's a really good experience with this issue. That's a great question. Anybody want to share? I can share a little bit. We allow multi-paper formats and our requirements are pretty low except every time there is a new paper in this multi-paper document that has to have a statement that they have the permission to use this as part of their document because sometimes these articles are previously published in a journal somewhere. So we have some minimum formatting and then they still have to follow whatever style guide is recommended by their department and their college. But we have just a little bit of a standard that they have to have a statement that they have permission to use this. And this is at Birmingham University. You have to be careful when you're using published journal articles, for example, because many of the journals will very carefully state that you must use a submitted version. You cannot keep the copy and paste directly from journal information because that's their value product. In other words, that's what they really, when they have a copyright, that's what they're interested in preserving. That's their format. And they don't want you using their format. And so you can get in big trouble if you copy and paste directly from a journal. So I've warned students about that all the time. You can use your last submitted version that you submitted to the journal that was accepted, but you cannot take it directly from a journal, either the graphics or the tables or the text. I've personally had the inverse of what Larry's talking about. Where students have documents, I mean, once they've published them, if they've already been published, they're not quite papers or under consideration, that they're already published. And let's say the publication that the document is in is their format is dual column single-spaced link text. And the journal or whatever says, this is exactly what it always has to look like, period. Students will want to, you know, ever. You can reprint it, but this is what it has to look like every time you reprint it. So what I tell students, and I don't know if anyone else has this issue, is anything that you put in the body has to adhere to our formatting guidelines. Anything in the body of your dissertation or thesis from chapter, from the first word of chapter one to the last word of conclusion or whatever has to adhere to our rules. You can, if you have a document that you want to include, but it has to stay in the formatting of that, of the journal or source, that's fine, you can include it, but it has to be an appendix. It cannot be a chapter. If they will not let you, if they will not let you just use the original text and reproduce it as a chapter, then absolutely you can include it, but it's not going to be considered a chapter. You know, I started thinking about inclusion of previously published information. And even information that hasn't been published, but what I'm seeing in student work now is that when they provide an ETD, each chapter will be almost a standalone publication in some journal once they're finished. Yeah, I think that might be... The only thing I tell them is you can't put the abstract in there because we only allow one abstract in the manuscript. So they can't do that. We say you've got to take the abstract out and you've got to tie everything together. I started thinking about that earlier day during one of the meetings and I'm just wondering if we either should require this to be put in an appendix rather than as a chapter within the main body of the manuscript itself or maybe a supplemental data, especially if it's previously published. And then they refer to it directly in their manuscript whatever happens to be in there that they need, whether it's a graph or a table, no matter what it is, they could refer to it directly and it would sure save a lot of hassle in the main body of the manuscript in terms of placing figures in tables, which is a real bugaboo for a lot of students. No matter what they use, whether it's Word or Latech or no matter what it is, easier in Latech, but in Word it can really be a mess. Yeah. I switch down to this slide so I can actually see people. But no, I think, and it's anyone else, any other experience that they're having with either formatting, document, Terry, go ahead. Oh, I just wanted to ask who is actually creating the guidelines or rules or policy on the inclusion of manuscript chapters? You know, at University of Toledo, it's the Graduate Council and the Executive Graduate Council that determines everything from the format to what is able to be included and a lot of that is actually, it reverts back to that particular college or department or faculty member to make the determination of whether or not they can include the manuscript chapter. We have an ETD advisory committee and that committee, since we're made up of five faculty members and five students are voting members and their advisory to me is the director of the ETD program. And so we take issues that we develop within the advisory committee and if the vote in the advisory committee is positive, we take that information to the Graduate Studies Council and then the Graduate Studies Council either approves or disapproves. I've yet to have them disapprove anything that the advisory committee would approve. So that seems to work very well for us. And it gets students involved in the ETD process early because they're really involved with, and I'm having students scramble to try to get onto that committee right now. I've got a waiting list for students to get on the committee. So it's working very well in that respect. Thank you. I just wanted to add that I pasted in in the chat our guide for theses and dissertations and on page 24 is where you find out information about compiling articles as a dissertation. And it's similar at UF as well. We go to the Graduate Council if we need to make changes. Right. Yeah. For us, for the purposes of just my job and for what my job encompasses, I tell students all the time, your document can say, your actual document can say literally blah, blah, blah for 200 pages if that's what you want. If your committee approves blah, blah, blah for 200 pages, that's fine. It just has to be formatted correctly. So for me, what is actually in the document itself? So Larry was saying that it can be in like three completely discreet documents that aren't chapters and may sort of incidentally refer to one another or not refer to one another but refer to topics that the others are discussing. But they're completely separate manuscripts. It's not a traditional dissertation or thesis the way we've seen it for a long time. And I tell our students, we actually allow them to, for each individual chapter, they can have an appendix for each chapter. They have to have an overarching appendix for the whole thing that says in this dissertation, I will discuss blah, blah, blah, whatever. But for each chapter, they're allowed to include the chapter for, I mean, I'm sorry, for each individual chapter slash manuscript, they're allowed to use the abstract for that. That's just us. I think we also allow that. In fact, if there's more than one article, each article could be about a different topic and an abstract is helpful in telling you what you're going to learn there. And we've taught our students to, if you're going to have more than one abstract, in the bookmarks, you can't just use the word abstract. You have to say, you know, abstract one. You re-label it so it's helpful to the user who's going to be reading it online. Yeah. I find that really surprising. We're like Larry where we even require them to tie those articles together. So they have to have kind of an overarching theme of what pulls them into one study and what makes them one bound body of work. So it, and this is a prime example of what we kind of do in this group. I mean, this is, this is what we do every month. And, you know, it's great. It's great to find out how different we all do things. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to quickly share. So that's, that's a good point. I'm just going to bring this one slide up really fast. I unhid because it was kind of not making any sense. Okay. So share one second. Okay. So I'm going to share this for a second. So hopefully you can see my slide. Now it says who are we. And like Stacy was saying, this is what we do. Let me get rid of this. This is what we do the, and I can give us a little bit more history later, but we are at our monthly meetings, which are set for an hour, but that's a, that's a very fluent setting. So we do have a lot of meetings. We do have a lot of meetings. We do have a lot of meetings. Sometimes it takes us 30 minutes to get done sometimes. I mean, we've had meetings that have gone on for an hour and a half. So it's, you know, but you're of course welcome to drop out whenever you would like to. We understand people have lives way beyond this. So yeah, it's usually there about 45 minutes long. That's pretty normal. But we just get together, discuss issues we're having. People throw out questions just like rocks and it. You know, you can't say anybody helped me with that. Sometimes it's an issue that is, you know, that is almost a one off in which you discuss that just that day, or it becomes something that you, and this has happened with me personally, it becomes something that you look into later or it becomes a presentation. So like I said, we meet every month. I put the zoom link and the information in the chat. colleagues from various schools who are members of the group who have come and given presentations about their processes, talked about issues they're having. When ProQuest was bought out by Clarivate, we had Austin McClain and Jillian Smith from ProQuest come and speak to us and tell us more about the situation and take questions and answers and that was very helpful for us and hopefully for them too. So that's what we do. These are like recent discussions, presentations we've had about accessibility and we are that's a big question that's come up and we're going to address that more in the future. Format standardization which that's sort of what we're talking about now and also modernizing formatting rules and that's what we were talking about earlier you know with the Janice brought up with single space versus double space. Digital ETDs that is the most unclear thing I've ever typed in my life. It means like born digital dissertations that are almost entirely online so that it's like the dissertation itself is not the item the online material is the item. So this is it's been very helpful for me at least I can I can speak for myself and anyone else please jump in. I've gotten help with a like a word issue that I was having I could not fix this problem with the table of contents and a colleague was able to help me fix this bizarre problem. I am I've spoken with I have I just had a meeting and we'll be having meetings about a ProQuest issue it's not it's not a ProQuest issue it's it's an issue that my my school is having with a crosswalking problem but I was able to find people who could help me when I couldn't find anybody who could help me at my own university. So that's why we're here. This we're going to go back to the discussion in a second but our Google doc the link is in the is in the chat if you would like to join the mailing list again please email me my email address is in the chat. We welcome anybody and everybody I think we have about gosh four year 50 people in the group if you have a colleague that is not part of USETDA the benefit from this first see if you can get them to you know come to USETDA it's a lot more helpful than people outside of our field think it is. Also if you think that they would be interested not so much directly in ETDs but in the conversations we have especially about like scholarly commons or technical issues with word absolutely if they would like to join and be on the mailing list that they'd like to attend please pass our info on. I'm going to unshare this. I also think it's a good place if you've got something that's a really good practice this is a good group to share this with. I know when our university went from optional ETD to requiring ETD I sat down with my colleague we just looked at a bunch of different universities how they formatted and we just made up our rules as far as what was on the title page and we learned a lot from everybody who was already out there you know a few years ahead of us and if you guys have great things you do for you know teaching or training you know share them with the rest of us so that we can copy your content you know. Absolutely I need I don't know if actually Messersmith is here today but I need to talk to her about overly stuff but actually if you're here I'm going to be emailing you next time next week. Yeah Janice is completely right this is if you're especially if you're either a school that is not electronic but hope to be there or as we work when I first joined US EPA if you're partially electronic then then you want to make the whole jump this would be a good place for you and already so if you know anyone any colleagues at other schools that either are not electronic at all or are trying to get there or partially there this is a good place to go so they can see you know either a see how great someone did it be use them as a as a teaching tool what not to do. Sally there's a comment in the chat that asks do you have a recording of that merger talk with Austin and Jillian? I do. Is that in the Google Doc? It's in the Google Doc. Oh hey Ashley. Oh sorry for some reason. Yeah, Gw I do and you can if you go to our Google page the share group doc if you go to the share group doc the chat with Austin is there I I'm gonna have to look and see I believe I might may have specifically named it as that but if not I'm gonna go I can go check in a second so yes I do have that. And just one last thing. Yes John if you John if you could please post the ProQuest video please do that would be great thank you. I was just gonna say that this group is very much a believers and open access sharing too so that's what I have found has been like Janna said go ahead and steal our texts go ahead and use our templates I think we've always shared amongst this group and that's that really helps all our institutions raise higher learning. Yeah it's helpful for a lot of people especially if you're at a public institution that doesn't have any money it's really helpful to get free things shared from colleagues who are there to help. Any other questions we especially want to hear from anybody who is who has not been to our session especially if you're having issues if there is something you'd like to talk about we're sure welcome to come to our upcoming sessions. Exactly, exactly. One second Janice you're kind of breaking up. Janice if you would use the Q&A and type in your statement. Sorry I'm catching up on the chat and I clicked on the wrong thing but we've found it really really valuable I'm probably in the next couple of months I ask a question both on the EGD listserv and within our group about an issue I was having about on-campus access and I mean sometimes all you sometimes you need true help you don't know where you don't know where to go other times you need a sounding board you need to find out is what I want to do or what I'm thinking normal and if in asking people to do this am I asking am I being ridiculous or if I don't ask people to do this is that ridiculous in a different way so sometimes it's just good to as I start with one slide it's nice to have people who understand what you're talking about. I actually have a question is anybody thinking or contemplating if you have templates about changing your templates so they need accessibility requirements. That's a great question Valerie and I think that's anything anyone has to say today great that's something that I think we should definitely tackle up in the next session in the future. Is anyone and is anyone beyond beyond thinking about it which I think we all either are or should be is anyone taking any has anyone taken any steps toward it yet and if so that we would love to hear from you when we would love for you to come and tell us about it. Cool so looks like Monica and Lily are thinking about it GW has planning it for our next ETD committee meeting yep Erica great. We have a question in the chat for schools that are using word templates to facilitate submission what has been the greatest challenge for students to properly use the template are there certain word template areas such as preliminary pages word main body text bibliography you that they consistently run off course and need to be a re-thrack good or yes I mean yes. Hey Sally can I interrupt real quick Stacy I need to borrow you at what 5.25 I'm gonna hop over to the stage for the poster presentation but if you can hang out here for a little bit longer but we need you to moderate and I sent you a direct message if you're not sure so okay thanks bye go ahead so yes I saw you as a message thanks but that's a great question Ron and doesn't what anyone like to speak to that first again for schools that are using word templates to facilitate submission what has been the oh okay great what has been the greatest challenge for students to properly use the template for run in my experience and this is this and this this is actually one of those perfect example of what we do the issue that I often see we have a biography at the end of our at the end of our theses and dissertations it's students are welcome to say whatever they'd like but but it's a required page and that's the most common thing that gets deleted and I don't I need to make this much more clear at our directions clear apparently clearly I do because like students who are in the English Department and I say this isn't as a former English student freak out because they don't have anything to put the list of equations but then delete the biography without even thinking twice about it they don't even ask should I have this do I need to have this meanwhile they're like should I just put an E equals MC squared no but put your biography back in and say something so that's that's the big issue we have pagination also is an issue but it's that's mostly just not following directions and I see there's a question in Q&A if anyone else has any like input about like word yeah Larry is going to talk about overly right great thank you yeah we definitely want to hear about overly chat though thank you Ron any other questions thanks easy oh and where we have about eight minutes left I was gonna share this with folks one second let me get back into here feel free to if anyone has anything they'd like to ask about any questions they'd like to raise I'm just pulling something up real fast that's a really good point GW says word is a lot less power user friendly than it was last century oh that's a Janice that's great my response to questions about signature pages is why have them in the document at all oh I agree I think they're archaic and ridiculous I think they're I think they're ritual for this for ritual sake and I like rituals as much as the next person but if if I can click a button online that says yes I'll pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a house surely I can say yes your dissertation is okay we don't use them at GW anymore yeah they're just well I'm at Mason I'm I'm this has been going on for a few years and COVID kind of got in the way of it but we're trying to move away from using signature sheets at all we're trying to fully automate that's way far down the road but yeah I well oh and actually GW says we're considering removing them from all of our digitized dissertations we actually don't like these signed signature sheets we don't share them online that I mean in the past there are some older ones that in the past like they all were but then every now and then one ends up there that's a long story that won't bore you with but yeah so Sally what we did was we replaced that signed signature sheet with what we call a certification page it just says that the school certifies blah blah blah and then they just list the committee members mm-hmm yeah what we do is we actually generate a Google form and all of the committee members and the mentor go into the Google form and it's password protected so they're the only ones that can get into it oh that's great they provide their pool and we just copy that approval and it goes directly into Google document and we put the Google document that goes into the file yeah so that's I but our school and this is just a quick anecdotal thing our school is very new George Mason has been around since about the 50s or 60s it's very very new and right now and I don't know if anyone else has this I would love to hear from them but on call on signatures and sheets depending on the college in school and within Mason they have signatures for the program director and or department chairperson and or Dean so they have like the Dean at least one Dean has to sign every signature sheet that comes through it like per their college and I understand why it was that way in the beginning because it was very small school and oh yes definitely actually it's important work for physical signature requirements I want to get rid of them all together but I won't put them online so but yes and we should definitely list committee member names absolutely Roxanne Lilly SC also signatures in the ETD correct great that's excellent but with us I think people started doing it in the beginning because it was you know this nice idea of having a communal experience and the Deans are you know very involved in your work and in your study and that's that's great when the school had like 6,000 people but we're now the largest public school in the state of Virginia and we're bigger than Virginia Tech and UDA so not together but that would be huge that'd be like Ohio University or Ohio or Ohio State but we yeah like we're a big school and it just doesn't make any sense that the Dean of the College of Science has to sign like 50 signatures years for especially for thesis and dissertations he's never or she's never going to see beyond just like maybe maybe reading the title so I want to get rid of them all together maybe that's maybe that can be our like viva revolution within our group get rid of signature sheets that's a really tough one yeah yeah and I don't know why everything is electronic now you just click on yeah but again I think it's ritual for ritual sake sure yeah and it I mean it's in some ways I know it's it's a nice idea but I I just I mean again like others are saying ruining physical signature replacements due to fraud issues absolutely um yeah it's I I would love to get rid of them I would be thrilled if they would if I could make that decision on my own at least from Mason they would have been gone in 2012 the like the first year after I started because they're ridiculous and I mean that for everybody it's not just ours approve it yes sign it who cares so any these are great any other questions comments et cetera or or jenna says our online system allows for approvals within the system and the department of college and the department and college approvers have to be authenticated by law and yes exactly I mean you have to be authenticated somehow I mean to do anything to look at stuff to look at specific materials within the library system to your time sheet whatever yeah no I I think that's a really great point I don't know why this is so hard I don't know why it's so hard to just say yes why you can do all of that other but you can't click a button that says I approve yes yes no more papers or chasing signatures Allison do you have a question just a comment can you hear me yeah okay well and sometimes it's it's at least in my institution because we're just kind of getting off the ground with um and with an ire um sometimes it's it's difficult to convince the departments to go away from the old way they're so used to doing things that it's it's kind of hard to convince them to um go completely electronic or still continue to submit bound versions of their of their work so what we and okay I'm sorry I just realized um we have about one minute left but I'm going to put this in this is I'm putting in a um if anyone wants to keep talking about this I would be more than happy to um I am putting in a zoom link to the absolutely totally unofficial unofficial uscgda um non-related uh happy hour chat about what we've been talking about if anyone has any further questions that they would like to discuss uh if you have um issues that were not that were not um discussed here please absolutely join our zoom meeting the link is in the chat so I'm starting that now so if anyone wants to keep talking about this come on over if not have a great rest of the day so uh last minute thank you all for being here today we hope to see you in further meetings again if you want to join our if you want to join the um group list please just please just email me ask me to add you and I will be happy to and thank you to all of our what I call the founding members of the uscdda um formatting users group thank you to our always active members who are there and thank you to Larry Janice and Valerie for being here on the panel as well today and thank you to everyone for your excellent questions again what you're talking to you thank you thank you guys have a good rest of the day bye