An ETD is a document that explains the research or scholarship of a graduate student. It is expressed in a form simultaneously suitable for machine archives and worldwide retrieval. The ETD is similar to its paper predecessor. It has figures, tables, footnotes, and references. It has a title page with the author's name, the official name of the university, the degree sought, and the names of the committee members. It documents the author's years of academic commitment. It describes why the work was done, how the research relates to previous work as recorded in the literature, the research methods used, the results, and the interpretation and discussion of the results, and a summary with conclusions.
The ETD is different, however, in that it provides a technologically advanced medium for expressing your ideas. You prepare your ETD using nearly any word processor or document preparation system, incorporating relevant multimedia objects, without the requirement to submit multiple copies on 50 percent cotton bond paper. Consequently, ETDs are less expensive to prepare, consume virtually no library shelf space, and never collect dust. At your choice, they can be available to anyone that can browse the World Wide Web.