UK theses digitisation project
Latest News (June 2009): This project is now complete and the theses are embedded within the Ethos thesis website at http://ethos.bl.uk. New theses continue to be added.
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The project
UK postgraduate theses are a very important source of primary research output but, says Colin Galloway, project director of EthOs, "There are currently thousands of theses sitting on the shelves of UK academic libraries, many of which will never have been read by anyone other than the author and supervisor. Even in those cases where there is knowledge of their existence there is no easy access to their content, with the result that potentially useful information is disregarded purely because of logistic/bureaucratic impediments."
Under this project, nearly 10,000 digitised theses are now freely available as open access, enabling all researchers regardless of location or time to search for, identify and order digitised UK theses, a resource which has had limited exposure via the British Library catalogue (metadata only minus abstract) and the commercial subscription Index To Thesis product. JISC has alreadyprovided funding for the Ethos platform to be delivered; this project provides some inital content.
The theses are supplied to researchers as pdfs. The researcher is able to read the thesis image on his/her computer screen but, by printing the pdf, he or she will get an exact surrogate of the original thesis. By sourcing surrogates from the electronically stored copies, the original paper theses will be accessed less frequently and so will be better preserved.
The content
There are around 500,000 paper theses originating from UK Higher Education Institutions and dating from 1730. Although the project is digitising only 1% of the overall total, it has targetted target the most ‘popular’ - those that are most likely to be requested and supplied to researchers - so the greater impact will be to release EThOS digitisation resources to digitise further theses.
The process
Each thesis has been digitised as a tiff file (one file per page), which will be stored for preservation, and a single, multi-page pdf file with OCR’d text for full text access and delivery. It promotes the adoption of standards compliant digitisation by applying standards developed in the digitisation workpackage of the EThOS project; metadata by associating the digitised theses with UK ETD qDC standard metadata held by EthOS; interoperability by applying already developed standards; and digital preservation by storing the tif files in state of the art British Library digital preservation systems and applying emerging digital preservation techniques to the stored files.
The future
This project creates the initial content set of a large-scale collection for a service offering a viable and sustainable business model. The digitised theses from this project will ‘seed’ the EThOS service with theses most relevant to researchers and will generate a critical mass to encourage future submission of theses in electronic form.
(Note: The project has received furhter funding via the JISC Digitisation Programme to digitise theses in the area of Islamic Studies
The project plan
Download the project plan to find out more about the detail of the project.
Lead site: The British Library
Project partners: CURL; Cranfield University; University of Warwick; University of Glasgow; University of Edinburgh; Robert Gordon University; University of Birmingham