Case Western Reserve University: School of Graduate Studies

Including complex multimedia objects in an ETD is a relatively new possibility. Those attempting this are pioneers. You are encouraged to work with those on your committee interested in incorporating these tools to gain their approval and assistance. Ultimately, they should check your final submission, including the multimedia portion. If this proves to be challenging, then you may want to think about saving your multimedia work into some other document (e.g., report, WWW site).

It is likely that complex multimedia objects will each reside in a different file, located in the same directory as the rest of your ETD. You may wish to add some icon or thumbnail or other small form of the complex multimedia object in the body of your ETD, and to have that linked to the complex multimedia object.

Archiving

Be careful to consider issues of long-term archiving.

Always include the highest resolution version of your object, not just a version suitable for today's devices, since technology may improve. You can include several versions, to help those with a variety of devices, particularly if the media itself is not scalable. For example, scan a slide at 2700 dpi, but have 640x480 and 320x240 versions as well.

If you can, include a version using a well-accepted international standard. Thus, for video, MPEG is encouraged.

If you use some proprietary software, include a viewer if it is allowed by the vendor. This will enable people to view your object without buying the software. You should also remember that in a few years this object may not be readily usable due to changes in versions and technology.

Acceptable File Formats

As an overall rule, CWRU and OhioLINK recommend file formats that are:

Platform-independent
Vendor-independent
Non-proprietary
Stable
Widely Supported

For certain kinds of formats, it is not yet possible to make specific recommendations, as "cutting edge" file types by definition have not yet established which competing formats will survive. In these cases, we ask you to exercise your own best judgment in meeting the criteria above.

Formatted Documents

OhioLINK only accepts Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF captures formatting information from a variety of desktop publishing applications, making it possible to send formatted documents and have them appear on the recipient's monitor or printer as they were intended. To view a file in PDF format, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free application distributed by Adobe Systems.

For reasons of long-term accessibility and preservation, OhioLINK will not accept documents in proprietary word processing formats such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect.

Note that we discourage the use of HTML unless authors take considerable care in ensuring that their markup conforms to published standards and that their use of links and inline images can stand alone in the ETD Center (i.e. no absolute links and no relative links to higher directories).

Images

Portable Network Graphics format (PNG) - PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits. more information

Tag(ged)Image File Format (TIFF) - TIFF is primarily designed for raster data interchange. Its main strengths are a highly flexible and platform-independent format which is supported by numerous image processing applications. Since it was designed by developers of printers, scanners and monitors, it has a very rich space of information elements for colorimetry calibration, gamut tables, etc.
more information

Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) - JPEG is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork, and similar material; however, it does not work as well on lettering, simple cartoons, or line drawings. JPEG handles only still images. A related standard called MPEG may be used for motion pictures.

Sound

MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) - This is the file extension for MPEG, audio layer 3. Layer 3 uses perceptual audio coding and psychoacoustic compression to remove all superfluous information (more specifically, the redundant and irrelevant parts of a sound signal that the human ear doesn't hear anyway). The result in real terms is layer 3 shrinks the original sound data from a CD by a factor of 12 without sacrificing sound quality. Guide to Adding Sound using Adobe Acrobat

Video

MPEG - This is the family of digital video compression standards and file formats developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group. MPEG generally produces better-quality video than competing formats, such as Video for Windows, Indeo and QuickTime. Guide to Adding Video using Adobe Acrobat

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets should be included only as comma-separated values or other delimited text. For reasons of long-term accessibility and preservation, OhioLINK will not accept documents in proprietary spreadsheet formats such as Microsoft Excel.

Program Code

Program code should be included only as raw, uncompiled text code. If you compile your code, it can become machine and operating system dependent. Consider adding program code as text files (.txt) linked from your PDF file. This way, people who would like to run your code can compile it on their local computers directly from the source files.