Digital libraries 2-5 can help to ensure that access to these works is facilitated by powerful tools for searching and browsing, while enforcing any restrictions required by authors, faculty, publishers or other institutions involved. For example, in select cases only the dissertation committee will be allowed access while patent protection is sought. Databases can keep track of citations to these works and can record the large numbers of references from theses to other parts of the scholarly literature. Scholars can explore the findings of recent graduates within weeks of completion of their dissertations, and can delve into the details of methodology, data and analysis. Some data sets, visualizations, programs, videos and other accompanying materials from research projects can be directly linked to theses, allowing scientific experiments to be replicated, discussed in classes and extended in new directions.
Libraries can ensure that the work of graduate alumni is archived and preserved in electronic form.
Building on their exposure to digital library methods from working with ETDs, universities can expand their use of these technologies to handle courseware and other records. Most importantly, scholars, having submitted their own theses and dissertations when they were graduate students, can become comfortable with and knowledgeable about digital libraries and electronic publishing, allowing a broadening of the Information Age so more people are involved, and their involvement is more serious. In 1988, Virginia Tech and SoftQuad developed the first SGML specification for dissertations. Work at Virginia Tech has continued, leading to a local collection of over 2000 ETDs by the middle of 1999. This collection includes colour images, virtual-reality descriptions of chemical structures, audio files that capture bird calls, video files that illustrate life in a Turkish coffee house, and hypermedia demonstrations such as an AuthorWare tutorial.