Electronic thesis

Subject: Electronic thesis
From: geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 12:11:44 -0500

Paula Puffer, brave soul, is <<writing the first electronic
thesis>> at her university, and wondered <<how to handle
links that lead to other sites.>>

First off, congratulations on breaking new ground, but
beware too: make sure you've nailed down all the details
with your thesis committee (_and_ with the university
authority responsible for approving theses)... a thesis is
a pain to do even with the normal, well-understood
traditional approach, and if you don't have an airtight
agreement now, you're in for considerable grief. Putting
the thesis on CD-ROM suggests that you've already done some
of this (i.e., universities always want a thesis in some
"durable medium"), but make sure you've got it "in
writing", and duly signed.

<<Since the topic is Web related, the outside references
are inevitable and because some of the documents will only
be available on the web the problem becomes even more
complicated.>>

This strongly suggests that you obtain copies of the actual
sites, or create reasonable simulacra, and store them on
your CD. (I'm hoping you've got room to spare... I don't
even want to consider writing a 600-Meg thesis!) If you're
thesis does something like pointing to reference
libraries--which won't fit on the CD--rather than
describing the structure of web sites in general (with
various illustrations), you've got more of a problem. The
biggest problem with web sites is that they evolve or
disappear so often that building them into your thesis
would invalidate the CD very quickly.

It should be easy to obtain _written_ permission to include
most sites; the ones that won't give you permission can't
stop you from describing the site in your own words... or
your own HTML, as the case may be. (There's a long-
established doctrine of "fair use" that lets you quote
extensively in reviews of bodies of literature, and web
sites should fall under the same doctrine.) You mentioned
other options:

<<1. Keep the Web relatively closed so that external links
are not immediately available to the user.>>

Not the best idea. People will want to try what you're
talking about, so the harder you make it for them to do so,
the less likely they'll try. Putting everything on the CD
solves this problem. If you can't do this:

<<In addition to the bibliography, make an Outside Links
Section that has all the active URLs included in it. The
user would be focused on the site and not have the
opportunity to drift from it. This may be fine for the CD,
but may actually be prohibitive for a functioning web
site.>>

One thing about links is that they get old faster than
fish. If you include a list of links, make sure you also
provide detailed information on the source of the link.
That way, if "nasa.gov" gets privatized and becomes
"nasa.bus", people can still do a web search for NASA and
find the actual information or related (e.g., updated)
information. Anyway, so long as your browser contains a
line into which users can type their own URL, you can't
stop people from "drifting away", so it's a non-issue.

<<It may mean that folks "drift" away from the site through
the external links. There might be a problem in terms of
the CD-ROM but I honestly don't know.>>

If the site is small enough, you can solve this easily
enough by providing a bookmark file akin to a table of
contents that people can load into their browser. That way,
no matter how far they drift, they can always return to
your thesis itself. I don't imagine it'll be much of a
problem: people will just get the usual "file not found"
type of error if they try to access a nonexistent file on
the CD.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)} geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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