• Building Biblographies:
  • (1)Standard format of bibliography for ETD is the first step for automate the bibliography process. EDT authority should specify the standard for ETD biblography.
  • (2)Standard citation format is also important.
  • (3)If you have standard format and standard citation, automation of biblography process should not be difficult. (Latex style)
• Comparing & Contrasting: Zoom in and out facility should be able to help compare two documents.
• Jargon Search: Domain specific jargon database will be helpful. In order to do search, you need to have the collections. Domain specific collections and databases will be useful.
• Find Open Problems: In almost every thesis and dissertation, it will have a section called limitations and future researches. Using a summarizing system, summarize these sections for each department, then present to ETD site as open problems.
• Find Influential Articles: Citation count is one measure of importance of a article. Chose some representative journals in the field, and count the citation. Chose the top citation papers.
• Find Common Approaches: Catagorizing different approaches in ETD collection for each field may be one way to accomplish it.
• Web crawler can be used to collect related papers and documents based on the references (if it has many online references) of the thesis and dissertation. By just traversing the references one or two link levels, you can collect a lot interesting resources related to the thesis and dissertation. This is like automatic resource compiler proposed by people from IBM and other places. ETD should use all these automatic tools to collect and compile the resources that will be useful for graduate students.
• One last suggestion is that ETD should have a catalog system. This catalog should based on graduate students' need, and can help them to write thesis and disseration. In order to have an automatically built in catalog, ETD should specify some meta info format.