Guidelines for Electronic Theses:

Format of Electronic Theses

Students should follow the guidelines and manuals as specified by the School of Graduate Studies, and/or the student's own College or Department when preparing their printed theses.

It is most likely that students will use a word processor to produce a printed copy of their theses. This computer file can then be re-used to create an electronic version of the theses.

Students are required to submit an electronic format of their theses as text-embedded searchable Adobe PDF (portable document format) files. The PDF files will be used for Web display and provide the potential for full text indexing. This format has been chosen because of its wide acceptance worldwide, its ease of creation and use, and its 'portability' or compatibility with many different computer platforms, such as Windows, Macintosh and Unix.

Adobe PDF Format

The PDF should be a searchable one, i.e. text embedded in the PDF. This will happen automatically if you use Acrobat to create the PDF files from common word processing software such as MS Word or WordPerfect. However, this will not happen if you scan a printed copy, store it in TIFF or other image format, and then convert it into PDF, unless you specify 'output text' in the output option. As well as the normal PDF file, the following multi-media files embedded in the PDF are also acceptable.

Images	GIF (.gif) JPEG (.jpeg) PDF (.pdf) use Type 1 PostScript fonts
Video	Apple QuickTime (.mov) Microsoft Audio Video Interfleaved (.avi) MPEG (.mpg)
Audio	AIF (.aif) MIDI (.midi) MP3 SND Wav (.wav)

If embedding in the PDF is not possible, links from within the PDF to these outside objects can be done (then you must make sure that the PDF files and outside objects are submitted together in the same folder).

Responsibilities

It is the responsibility of the student to ensure that an acceptable soft copy format of his/her thesis is submitted to the School of Graduate Studies. The Library and the Computing Services Centre provide utilities for file conversion and PDF creation. To check with the Library, please send your enquiries to lb@cityu.edu.hk.

Number of Files to be Submitted

Students are required to make at least 2 files for submission:

• abt.pdf - title page, abstract and table of contents of thesis
• ftt.pdf - full text of the thesis including title page, table of contents, abstract, body of the thesis and bibliography. (If the file is very large and splitting is necessary, it should be done along chapter divisions, or groups of chapters, using the numbering ftt1.pdf, ftt2.pdf, ftt3.pdf, etc.)

The submission of the file containing the title page, abstract and table of contents of each thesis will help to enhance the searching capability as all theses will be fully catalogued and hence conveniently searchable in the Library's online system.

As the eventual goal is to make CityU theses available to the world at large via internationally recognized organizations such as the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) or Current Research @ provided by University Microfilm International (UMI), further amendments will be made to the number of files submitted as necessary.

File Naming Convention

1. the abstract file of the thesis of a PhD student whose student number is 12345678 should be named as phd-12345678-abt.pdf;
2. the full text file of the thesis of an MPhil student whose student number is 87654321 should be named as mphil-87654321-ftt.pdf.

When the files of each electronic thesis are put into CityUTO, they will be renamed using a unique identifier.

Other Technologies

Students may wish to use newer technologies, such as digital multimedia, hyper linking, etc. for their theses. In these cases, students must check early in their thesis production, on the viability of software involved vis-à-vis, library preservation, and incorporation of such theses in the Library online database. Problems are not expected but please send your enquiries to lb@cityu.edu.hk for clarifications.

CityU Theses Online