Colleagues
The EThOS Update e-news for February 2012 has just been sent to all our EThOS contacts, and is copied here for wider sharing following a suggestion last month. 

Recent progress: 
We've completed the technical changes needed to manage the new membership model and revised digitisation prices, and a load process is almost in place to support the transfer of library catalogue records into EThOS. We've stepped up harvest activity and are now harvesting from 42 institutions; over 1000 theses were added to EThOS in the last month through either harvest or digitisation. 

Meanwhile, we continue to create new records from the paper title pages that you send in when no electronic records are available: an average of 850 title pages are processed every month in this way. And we've recently sent a first batch of metadata to a third party resource discovery service - as soon as that's live we'll report more details. 

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EThOS and Google Scholar: 
We're now talking to Google Scholar to push ahead with work to enable Google Scholar indexing of EThOS records. We'll be starting with indexing the metadata and abstracts only - not the full text - until we can be certain the indexing is successful and institutions can cope with the likely increase in demand for digitisation. Google Scholar already indexes the content of many of your repositories, but for other institutions, the exposure of EThOS data via Google Scholar will be an enormous benefit. 

We've already been in touch with those institutions that fund digitisation of their own theses to consult on the potential increase in digitisation demand and the impact on their budgets. We'll also be picking up tips from the recent discussion on the Repositories list but if anyone has questions on this development, please get in touch. 

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Plagiarism protection:
The EThOS Board will soon be meeting iParadigms, the providers of Turnitin, to explore how we might offer reassurance to authors that any plagiarism of content held in EThOS would be detected. 

A recent survey - http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/116819/ - found that plagiarism was one of the most commonly expressed concerns about open availability of theses, and that perceived barriers could often be overcome through advocacy, education and the well-advertised use of protective technologies. Under a proposed arrangement with iParadigms, content held by EThOS would be added to the corpus of material against which common plagiarism detection tools check newly submitted work. An outline of the proposal looks like this:

EThOS content would be held in the iParadigms database; this content is not visible or searchable by any end-user or institution but held solely as the source database against which new items are checked. 

When an institution runs work through Turnitin or similar systems, any plagiarism of theses that are held in EThOS would be detected. 

EThOS would receive statistical reports to show the extent of plagiarism attempts against UK theses, and would share findings with member institutions. All data would be anonymised, and details of individual matches would be unlikely to be shared. 

EThOS theses themselves would not be checked for plagiarism. If institutions want to check new theses for plagiarised content, this could be done in the same way as for any other student work, by running the material through the checking service. 

We have already had initial discussions with iParadigms about how a partnership might work, but no conclusions have been reached so far. We would now like to have your views and questions about this proposed development so that the Board can discuss in some detail a possible agreement with iParadigms. If you have lots of questions, we'll prepare an FAQ and continue discussions with you.

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Facts & figures:
This month, a list of the top 10 most frequently downloaded titles during January 2012. Awarded by ten different institutions, the theses date from between 1981 and 2011, suggesting little correlation between the age of a thesis and its frequency of use. 

1. EThOS ID 285166, The way of transformation (the Laban-Malmgren system of dramatic character analysis), 1997, Royal Holloway, 15 downloads 

2. 537036 Human resource development: training and development practices and related organisational factors in Kuwaiti organisations, 2011, Bradford, 9 

3. 320330 Women's managerial career progression: an attributional analysis in three organisations, 1994, LSE, 8. 

4. 280678 Art, propaganda and patronage: a history of the employment of British war artists, 1916-1919, 1981, Reading, 8 

5. 436837 Voltage stability analysis and control in power systems, 2007, Strathclyde, 8 

6. 425444 The impact of business environment on management accounting practices: Libyan evidence, 2006, Liverpool,8 

7. 441191 Life histories and career decisions of women teachers, 2007, Leeds, 7 

8. 250514 Reading museums and heritage sites: towards a poststructuralist and postmodern museology, 2001, Cardiff, 7 

9. 419378 Management accounting practices in Jordan: a contingency approach, 2005, Bristol, 7 

10. 252718 Power relations and fool-master discourse in Shakespeare: a discourse stylistics approach to dramatic dialogue,1990, Nottingham, 7. 

A record 12285 theses were downloaded in total during January, and there were over 2000 click-throughs to repository-held copies. 

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Any questions please contact me or [log in to unmask]

Best wishes 
Sara 

Sara Gould 
EThOS Service Manager 
The British Library
Boston Spa 
LS23 7BQ 
T: 01937 546123 
M: 07768467929 
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