Book excerpt: As open access initiatives, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) provide Internet access to graduate student research documents from hundreds of academic institutions, thus furthering international scholarly communication. The last decade has seen change and collaboration among colleagues of varied disciplines and across institutional boundaries. There is a need for practical information for academics, database managers and library catalogers in dealing with the complexities of developing ETD programs and workflow. The authors present a comprehensive treatise on ETDs, drawing on many years of collective experience within this specialization. This book was published as a special issue of Technical Services Quarterly.