Digital Library Center provides online dissertations

September 27, 2007

More than 9,500 dissertations from University of Florida graduate students of years gone by now languish on UF library shelves. The dissertations have been cast aside in the digital age which demands instant information.

But, if a new project at the George A. Smathers Libraries Digital Library Center is successful, decades of writings will soon be available around the world, with just the click of a mouse.

“What I’d like people to see is that the University of Florida is doing good work, and that we have in the past as well,” said Cathy Martyniak, head of the Library Preservation department.

Dissertations were first submitted electronically in 1998 at UF, and since 2001, the university required electronic submission for all dissertations. Martyniak said. Copyright restrictions require any doctoral candidate who completed work before 2001 to sign a release granting permission for scanning and Internet distribution.

Martyniak is overseeing the daunting task of collecting thousands of release forms from prior doctoral candidates- spanning the course of the university’s history.

“If I can find an author from 1922 who is still alive and willing to sign the paper, we will post their work online,” she said, adding that she hopes to receive as many as she can.

Once a release form is submitted, the dissertation is scanned at the Digital Library Center and information called “metadata” provides information about the work, such as title, author, subject, year of publication and length. The work is then uploaded to the Digital Collections’ Web site, where the metadata allows for easy and accurate retrieval.

“People spend years and years of their life getting their dissertations together, and then for them to see it on the web is exciting,” Martyniak said.

Although the center has been accepting signatures since January, only twelve release forms have been received. Martyniak believes this may be due to a lack of publicity about the project, as well as the sheer number of eligible alumni who have not yet been contacted.

Oliver G. Wood, Jr. was one of the first alumni to respond to the request. His 1965 dissertation about the Federal Reserve System is now the oldest dissertation available online within Digital Collections.

“I thought it would be a good opportunity to make my dissertation available without cost to people,” said Wood, who is the economist-in-residence at the Charleston School of Law, and has been a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina since 1994.

“I am a person who truly is grateful for my University of Florida education, and I strongly encourage anybody who has written a dissertation at Florida to make it available,” Wood said. “This is a part of the ongoing process of telling the world that the University of Florida is a great university.”

To participate in this project, UF dissertation authors are encouraged to visit: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/digital/procedures/copyright/retro_diss_scan/DDDCA.htm.