Electronic thesis

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 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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