Guidelines for Electronic Dissertations:

Format of Electronic Dissertations

Students should follow the guidelines and manuals as specified by the student's own College or Department when preparing their printed dissertations.

Some departments may decide to undertake the creation of the electronic version of the selected dissertations for sending to the Library. Students should therefore check with their individual departments for their specific arrangements.

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

The electronic format of the dissertations should be 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. Besides, 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 included (then you must make sure that the PDF files and outside objects are submitted together in the same folder).

Responsibilities

If the College/Department require individual students to create their own PDF files for submission, it is the responsibility of the student to ensure that an acceptable soft copy format of his/her dissertation is submitted to the student's own College or Department. 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 the dissertation
• ftt.pdf - full text of the dissertation including title page, table of contents, abstract, body of the dissertation 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 dissertation will help to enhance searching as submitted dissertations will be fully catalogued and hence conveniently searchable in the Library's online system.

File Naming Convention

To facilitate processing on receipt of the electronic dissertations, files for submission should be named in the format: Degree-Student number-File type.pdf. For example,

1. the abstract file of the dissertation of a M.A. student whose student number is 12345678 should be named as ma-12345678-abt.pdf;
2. the full text file of the dissertation of an M.Sc. student whose student number is 87654321 should be named as msc-87654321-ftt.pdf.

When the files of each electronic dissertation 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 taught postgraduate dissertations. In these cases, students must check early in their dissertation production, on the viability of software involved vis-à-vis, library preservation, and incorporation of such dissertation in the Library online database. Problems are not expected but you may send your enquiries to lb@cityu.edu.hk for clarifications.

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