Doctoral students spend years on their dissertations. Too bad the results of their hard work often end up in a cardboard box in a dark corner of a library.
Now Stanford University doctoral students will be able to store their dissertations in a digital repository instead of submitting several bound paper copies to the university, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The university has also reached an agreement with Google, which will serve as a third-party distributor, meaning users of the search tool will be able to find the dissertations. Administrators hope the move will save the university money and give students’ work a greater audience.
“We have way north of 35,000 bound dissertations on our shelves,” Stanford’s university librarian, Michael Keller, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Many of them just stay on the shelf, forgotten and invisible, or scholars have to pay enormous sums to come to Stanford to read them.”
Students used to get their dissertations printed and bound, and then delivered three or four copies to the registrar’s office. They can still do it that way if they prefer.
Mr. Keller told the San Francisco newspaper that he thought Stanford was the only institution encouraging electronic submissions of dissertations to this extent. In an e-mail message to The Chronicle of Higher Education, a Google spokeswoman said she didn’t know of similar programs at any other universities.
14 Responses to Stanford Doctoral Students Can Now Submit Dissertations Online
davidcash - November 19, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Mr. Keller told the San Francisco newspaper that he thought Stanford was the only institution encouraging electronic submissions of dissertations to this extent.Mr. Keller seems to be mistaken. Georgia Tech *only* accepts theses in an electronic format, and it has been that way since 2004.
suzannewayne - November 20, 2009 at 6:03 am
Penn State has accepted electronic theses and dissertations since 1998.http://www.etd.psu.edu/
suzannewayne - November 20, 2009 at 6:07 am
There is also a network making electronic theses and dissertations available to a broader public. Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)http://www.ndltd.org/
drosenbl - November 20, 2009 at 6:57 am
“Many of them just stay on the shelf, forgotten and invisible, or scholars have to pay enormous sums to come to Stanford to read them.”Someone should tell Mr Keller about ProQuest Digital Dissertations
smarvay - November 20, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Rutgers University has required since 2007 that all dissertations be submitted electronically, and they’re all freely searchable and downloadable as PDFs through the Rutgers Community Repository:http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu
msulibraries - November 20, 2009 at 1:12 pm
We’ve been requiring submission of electronic theses and dissertations for several years at Mississippi State University. Maybe a better headline would have been “Stanford Doctoral Students Can Finally Submit Dissertations Online.”
11159995 - November 20, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Virginia Tech University pioneered eTDs way back in the early 1990s. I was on the eTD committee at Penn State that got that university into it in the late 1990s, first on a voluntary basis and then mandatory. All of these programs, linked together by NDLTD, are wonderful ways to expose dissertations to a much wider readership, but junior faculty need to be aware that if their dissertations are widely available in this way (and also through ProQuest), there are many academic libraries these days that will not buy books based on their dissertations. This is an unfortunate byproduct of technological advance: one step forward, one step back. I have written about this problem in “Dissertations into Books?” accessible here: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html
geochaucer - November 20, 2009 at 6:38 pm
I especially enjoy comment 4, and the list of “been there/done that” schools is just the tip of the iceberg. I hope the Chronicle does better reporting next time rather than just picking up poorly-researched newspaper stories. I’m reminded of the first Austin Powers and Dr. Evil announcing this new thing, the “Laser,” complete with finger quotations. There might be a new wrinkle with the Google element, perhaps different than Rutgers’ access, for example, but that’s not what the story trumpets.
jade_ankh - November 23, 2009 at 12:48 am
Just Google ‘electronic delivery of thesis’ or ‘electronic collection of thesis’ and there are several links of other Universities who have been e-submitting for quite a while. Clearly the ‘Google spokeswoman’ didn’t do that. Nice to see Stanford’s cathching up. : )
wscclibrary - November 23, 2009 at 9:47 am
We have been doing this for years in Ohio through the OhioLink (http://www.ohiolink.edu). They are joining the game too late.
davi2665 - November 23, 2009 at 12:51 pm
This story reminds me of a 2000 story published in an upstate NY newspaper regarding Kodak- noting that Kodak had just announced that photography had entered the digital age.
costarec - November 23, 2009 at 7:11 pm
OK, I’ll throw in my 2 cents. I have been requiring all deliverables from my CS1 programming students and my Data Structures students to be submitted electronically since I began teaching at Antelope Valley College in 1999.
sharonlenga - November 24, 2009 at 8:22 am
Glad Stanford has joined the rest of us.The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel receives PhD’s electronically, as do most of the other Israeli universities
jwebbwsu - December 3, 2009 at 10:42 pm
This is amateur reporting by both “Chronicles.” Stanford must be the last university on earth to “allow” digital dissertation submissions. If it were April 1, this article would be a fool’s joke.