 All right, so now we're going to move to our second poster, which will be presented by Corey L. Nimer and Rebecca A. Widerhold, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, of Brigham Young University Library. The title of their poster is Archivist and E.T.D.'s Collaborating to Improve Access and Preservation. Well, thank you for having us. Again, I'm Corey Nimer. I'm the University Archivist here at Brigham Young University. And I'm Rebecca Widerhold and I'm the cataloger of our archival collections. And so we're excited to just present maybe some basic research that we've done on what the relationships were between University Archives programs and E.T.D. programs. So historically, the management of theses and dissertations has been split between University Libraries and University Archives. And archivists have advocated for both approaches in their management. With the widespread adoption of E.T.D.'s in recent years, there's been a greater focus in the scholarly literature and the role of scholarly communications as a record of being over an interpretation of these records as maybe an official record of university scholarship. But for many institutions, they need to balance both these imperatives and the management of the thesis program. In this project, we sought to identify the current landscape of how these resources are managed with the hope of identifying best practices for both print and electronic theses and dissertations. This poster reports on two surveys of academic libraries in the Association of Research Libraries. One of these was a review of publicly accessible online documentation, followed by a formal survey distributed to university archivists on local policies and practices for thesis dissertations. So as noted on the poster, with the rise of institutional archives in the 20th century, there emerged different practices for the management of theses. In some cases, they've been added to campus retention schedules as records, meant to be preserved on the archives, while in other cases, they're placed in the University Library. For its part, in 1972, the Society of American Archivists passed a resolution confirming that theses should be considered to be records, but took no position on whether they should be placed in the archives as long as they were preserved. In more recent years, SAA's guidelines for college and university archives included MA and honor species in their list of academic records. But note that, quote, the relative importance of such records will vary with each institution in accordance with the institutions, the archives mission statements, and quote. Particularly given the focus on ETDs in the library and scholarly communications literature, it's just unclear how archivists are involved with their management's records today. So in preparing this study, we hope to understand how thesis and dissertations fit into current archival programs. This included first, determining how often print theses and ETDs are designated as records. Secondly, how archivists and scholarly communications librarians collaborate. And third, understanding how satisfied archivists were with the existing arrangements. Additionally, we also hope to learn how the retrospective digitization of theses and dissertations might impact existing archival collections of printed logics. To limit the scope of the survey, we only included ARL affiliated academic libraries in the United States. Data gathering was completed in two phases. The first was a review of publicly accessible online documentation about pieces and dissertations found on institutional web pages for university libraries, university archives, institutional repositories, and records management units. At the same time, a survey was distributed by email to university archivists from each of these institutions, and we got back a 50% response rate on this survey. So some of our findings, our initial research confirmed that the management of physical copies of theses and dissertations, or I'm going to call them TDs, remains split between university archives and libraries. In our survey, 57% of respondents reported that theses and dissertations were listed as records in their retention schedules. However, over two thirds of institutions housed print copies of these materials in archives for special collections storage. With the introduction of ETDs, however, our survey suggested that responsibility for the research output of university programs has in some cases shifted to institutional repositories that are largely the domain of university libraries. With the survey, we sought to identify which unit was responsible for the preservation of TDs generally, and how that aligned with responsibility for publishing ETDs. Based on submitted responses, the most common response 40% was for university archives to be responsible for the long term preservation of the TD collection. Other responsible units included special collections, 8%, and scholarly communication offices, also 8%. Though many of the respondents indicated that this responsibility was shared between the university archives and either special collections or scholarly communication offices. For publishing functions, however, only 4% of university archives had responsibility for ETD publication. This task usually fell instead on scholarly communication offices, including the institutional repository at 68%. In general, at institutions where theses and dissertations are designated as records, archivists reported greater involvement in institutional repositories. 44% of university archivists surveyed consider their role in the institutional repository as contributor and 22% as advisor. Only 24% of university archivists see themselves in an administrator role, and 28% have no role at all. University archives content is commonly found in institutional repositories, however, 76% of IRs surveyed hold ETDs. We also sought to determine if the shift of responsibility for the research output of university programs might lead to a greater focus on digitization of legacy print collections to improve scholarly access to their content. At this point, few ARL libraries, 10% of respondents have completed retrospective conversion of archival collections of TDs, although 35% are currently engaged in a digitization project. And another 12% indicated they have plans to potentially digitize print TDs in the future. Most appear to rely on print copies for preservation purposes. Finally, our survey suggested that archivists were more satisfied with the management of theses and dissertations at institutions where they were designated official records than those at other academic libraries. So in conclusion, through the survey we found university archivists are generally satisfied with the administration of their institutional thesis and dissertation program. However, many archivists also indicated that improvements were needed. Most significantly, they called for greater coordination between campus units involved in the ETD process. They also suggested a single point of contact for overall curation of theses and dissertations. Other priorities include a digitization of print TDs to improve access and consideration of long term preservation for born digital ETDs. Recognizing that the data collected from this study is focused on the archives perspective, future research might investigate issues of TD management and preservation from a library administration perspective. We also determined overarching strategic objectives that are driving current practices relative to TD preservation access models and future planning for print theses and ETD collections. Great. Thank you, Rebecca and Corey. Are there any questions. I haven't seen anything pop up in the chat yet. See, one question is, what was your sample size. So, again, limiting it just air and institutions in the United States, academic libraries that is the same. There's only 100. So we didn't send we didn't sample that down we sent invitations to the survey to all 100 institutions. So we got back 50 responses out of that. Thank you. Someone else has asked if you could elaborate on what you mean by curation in context to your study. Yeah, I think there's a few different aspects to that idea of curation, whether that's administration of a program or management of a collection or long term responsibility or making sure that it exists into the future. I mean, in some ways that was central to doing this research was just understand. Since these responsibilities seem to be diverging, especially in cases where pieces and dissertations are official records at the university. Oftentimes that's considered to be the role of archives. But again, as as this is shifting to greater involvement by scholarly communications, just making sure that there's someone ultimately whose responsible for making sure that these exist into the future. Again, especially if they are records the university. I think that's all the questions. So again, thank you, Rebecca and Corey of those great presentations.