Analysis of URL references in ETDs: a case study at the University of North Texas
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-08-2013-0073 |
| Date | 03 June 2014 |
| Published date | 03 June 2014 |
| Pages | 293-307 |
| Author | Mark Edward Phillips,Daniel Gelaw Alemneh,Brenda Reyes Ayala |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,HR in libraries |
Analysis of URL references in
ETDs: a case study at the
University of North Texas
Mark Edward Phillips, Daniel Gelaw Alemneh and
Brenda Reyes Ayala
UNT Libraries, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA
Abstract
Purpose – Increasingly, higher education institutions worldwide are acce pting only electronic
versions of their students’ theses and dissertations. These electronic theses and dissertations
(ETDs) frequently feature embedded URLs in body, footnote and references section of the document.
Additionally the web as ETD subject appears to be on an upward trajectory as the web becomes
an increasingly important part of everyday life. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors analyzed URL references in 4,335 ETDs in the UNT
ETD collection. Links were extracted from the full-text documents, cleaned and canonicalized,
deconstructed in the subparts of a URL and then indexed with the full-text indexer Solr. Queries
to aggregate and generate overall statistics and trends were generated against the Solr index. The
resulting data were analyzed for patterns and trends within a variety of groupings.
Findings – ETDs at the University of North Texas that include URL references have increased over
the past 14 years from 23 percent in 1999 to 80 percent in 2012. URLs are being included into ETDs in
the majority of cases: 62 percent of the publications analyzed in this work contained URLs.
Originality/value – This research establishes that web resources are being widely cited in UNT’s
ETDs and that growth in citing these resources has been observed. Further it provides a preliminary
framework for technical methods appropriate for approaching analysis of similar data that may be
applicable to other sets of documents or subject areas.
Keywords Digital libraries, Electronic theses and dissertations, Institutional repositories,
Link analysis, Link extraction, Web archiving
Paper type Research p aper
Background
Libraries have traditionally been responsible for collecting and curating the research
needed by graduate students and faculty to complete their scholarly activities, and in
turn, they work to acquire this completed scholarly literature in a virtuous-circle of
building research collections around and for the research conducte d at their institution.
The number of scholarly web resources is growing as movements such as Open Access
allow and encourage researchers and scholars to publish their findings and research in
non-traditional ways. The need to locally capture and curate these items is being raised
in academic research libraries around the world. Whereas the library community has
long standing workflows and processes for identifying, acquiring, and describing
traditional scholarly literature, the web has raised many new and unanswered
questions about how to accomplish these same tasks for the online environment. By
and large academic libraries are not capturing and maintaining collections of web
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0143-5124.htm
Received 20 August 2013
Accepted 6 September 2013
Library Management
Vol. 35 No.4/5, 2014
pp. 293-307
rEmeraldGroup Publishing Limited
0143-5124
DOI 10.1108/LM-08-2013-0073
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 16th International Symposium on Electronic
Thesesand Dissertations (ETD),in Hong Kong, on 23-26September 2013, http://lib.hku.hk/etd2013/
293
URL references
in ETDs
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