Deposit collections of digital theses and dissertations

The Portuguese legal deposit law requests the deposit of theses and dissert ations in the National Library. The actual law is concerned only with print ed material, but the National Library has been defining a strategy to addre ss also the problem of the deposit of digital publications. These efforts a re concentrated in three main components: an overall analysis of the struct ure of the problem; the development of the concept of publication genre; an d the development of the concept of deposit by scenarios. In this context, the deposit of theses and dissertations emerged as an ideal case study for a scenario concerned with a specific genre, which deserves to be addressed not only as a purpose in itself, but also as an experiment from which we ex pect to learn valuable lessons for the overall problem.