UPDATE: our Dissertation Festival week took place from 25th – 29th October 2021. You can access recordings from the programme of online events at the Dissertation Festival webpage
Our next Dissertation Festival will take place in March 2022.
The academic support librarian team have created a new subject guide called Making the Most of Your Dissertation, you can find it here: https://edinburgh-uk.libguides.com/dissertation
This is one of the many subject guides created to help you with your studies.
You can also watch a helpful video here.
Our dissertation subject guide ties in with a whole week of activities launching for the first time this month: Make the Most of Your Dissertation Week 2019, from 11 – 15 November, which is packed full of activities and opportunities for students to engage with the library collections and resources and get lots of inspiring ideas for resources and collections that can be used for your dissertation.
For more information about Make the Most of Your Dissertation Week 2019, look out for #DissertationWeek or go to http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/yourdissertation
The University Library PhD digitisation project will complete the digitisation of the University of Edinburgh’s collection of roughly 25,000 PhDs.
Approximately 10,000 PhDs are already accessible online through the Edinburgh Research Archive, our institutional repository, and this project will digitise the remaining 15,000, thereby making unique Edinburgh research available to all.
The collection dates from the early 1600s to the present day and includes theses of varying sizes, styles and formats. Duplicate theses will have their spines removed using an IDEAL 4705 Guillotine and will then be fed through the 100-page-per minute Kodak i4250 document scanner. These copies will be recycled, freeing up around 500 linear metres of storage space in the Main Library building.
Unique theses will be scanned manually using a Copibook Cobalt flatbed scanner and any items in poor condition will receive conservation treatment.
Following scanning, digital images will undergo several post-processing procedures, such as de-skewing, cropping and de-blurring, and will also be OCR-ed to enable keyword searching. Fully processed files will be uploaded to ERA as searchable multipage PDFs.
All files are due to be made available online by the end of 2018. For further information, please contact Gavin.Willshaw@ed.ac.uk
You can find more information on the project blog at:
http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/phddigitisation/
To search our databases for other PhDs and dissertations from across the world, go to our webpage for theses databases at: http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/library-museum-gallery/finding-resources/library-databases/databases-subject-a-z/database-theses
