(Adapted from Virginia Tech University)

[Updated October 5, 1999]

An Electronic Thesis or Dissertation (ETD) is a document that explicates the research of a graduate student and expresses in a form simultaneously suitable for machine archives and worldwide retrieval. The ETD is divided into front matter, body matter, and back matter.

Similar to paper... the ETD is similar to a paper dissertation.

It has figures, tables, footnotes, and references. It has a title page with your name, the name of your school, and the names of your committee members. It documents your years of academic commitment. It describes why the work was done, how the research relates to previous work as recorded in the literature, the research methods used, the results, and the interpretation and discussion of the results, and a summary with conclusions.

Only different... the ETD is different, though.

It provides a technologically-advanced medium for expressing your ideas. You prepare your ETD using nearly any word processor or document preparation system, incorporating relevant multimedia objects, without the requirement to submit multiple copies on 25% cotton bond paper. Consequently, ETDs are less expensive to prepare, consume virtually no library shelf space, and never collect dust. While they can be made available to anyone that can browse the Web, at UNL they are only available to the campus community.