At Antioch University, PhD students and faculty in the Leadership and Change program are embracing new media scholarship with open arms. The ETD collection in Antioch’s Digital Commons repository, AURA, is brimming with student-produced videos, photographs, and animations accompanying many of the projects—a number of which have won international awards. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), an “international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations,” has recognized an Antioch student with an “Innovative ETD Award” every year from 2007 all the way through 2012.
Deborah Baldwin, Doctoral Research Librarian and ETD Coordinator, plays an integral role in the process and has been excited by the amount of enthusiasm she’s seen for multimedia from students and faculty alike. “I think that the cat is out of the bag,” she said. “You hand these tools to students and they run with it. I really think the impetus came from two groups, the art community and the technology community. In my program it’s mainly the arts people, but it’s expanding. I do see this as a huge international movement.” As the movement picks up steam, Deb has found students from other PhD programs taking note of her students’ international awards and contacting her about including multimedia in their own ETD projects.
Though she lends crucial technical support and copyright knowledge, Deb says that most of the work is still done by the students, who are responsible for creating their own videos, animations, and photographs. For those librarians who are interested in integrating new media scholarship into their own ETD programs, Deb offers this advice: “By the end of the process students are so fried. You have to be talking to a student [about incorporating multimedia] early in the process, before they defend and before they propose, and make sure their supplemental files are on track.”
For more information about ETDs and ETD workflows, watch our webinar “Emerging Trends in ETD Publishing Models: A Bird’s Eye View.”
Antioch University’s Leadership and Change program ETD series.
