ETD2016, the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, took place from July 11 to July 13, 2016, at Lille. The conference has been hosted by the Humanities and Social Sciences University of Lille and co-organized with the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).
From 1998 on interested institutions in the United States began meeting annually for what would become a series of symposia on electronic theses and dissertations sponsored by NDLTD and designed to help universities initiate ETD projects. The first symposium was held at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in 1998, and since then, the gatherings have taken place at universities all around the world, with the first European venue being Humboldt University in Berlin, in 2003. More recently, theses conferences were held in Sydney, Aberdeen, Pittsburgh, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Austin, Uppsala, Lima, Leicester and New Delhi.
In 2016, the ETD International Symposium series came for the first time to France. The theme of the conference was "Data and Dissertations", with a focus on the handling of research data produced by PhD students. As the former events of the series, ETD2016 provided delegates the unique opportunity to learn from each other, discuss new projects and initiatives, share experiences and good practices from around the world, and offered perspectives for further research and development. ETD2016 welcomed 120 delegates from 27 countries, university librarians and other information professionals interested in ETD and research data, scientists and scholars in library and information sciences, and LIS students.
