Report on the Fourth Annual Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Conference opened to a crowd of 165 attendees with a rousing call to action by Caltech Provost Steven Koonin stating that electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) could and should unleash scholarly material for more general accessibility. Indeed throughout the conference there was direct evidence of a building sea change accompanied by less obvious hints of inevitable movement in the conversion of theses from a print genre to an online communication medium of record.