The impact on electronic theses and dissertations is of an important issue to scholarly community. The practices and developments of the NDLTD and Virginia Tech's ETD program are the main concern in this study. It is found that commercial mechanism involving dissertations publishing is inevitable, especially, by the electronic form on the web or on CD-ROMs. Policies and strategies are examined in order to figure out a better vision for digitizing academic works. To satisfy the authors' need and respect them are the most essential one for building the future.