Libraries Add Over 11,000 MIT Theses to DSpace

Contact: Heather Denny
MIT Libraries Communications Officer
hdenny @mit.edu
617-253-5686, (F) 617-253-8894

September 16, 2005

The MIT Libraries have recently added over 11,000 electronic copies of MIT theses to DSpace— doubling the content of the digital archive and providing worldwide exposure to the work of MIT scholars. The MIT thesis collection is already one of the most widely-used collections of its kind. It includes the theses of well-known MIT alumni such as Charles Stark Draper '26, Harold Eugene Edgerton '27, I.M. Pei '40, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin '63, Shirley Ann Jackson '73 and Nobel Prize winners Kofi Annan '72 and Richard Feynman '39, to name a few. In DSpace their work, and the valuable research of many others, will now be even more accessible from the Web.

Theses can be found on the DSpace website at: http://libraries.mit.edu/mit-theses. They are organized by academic department, and can also be easily searched by author, degree, title, thesis supervisor, and keyword. Each thesis has its own Internet address, also called a handle, which can be used as a permanent link, ensuring that the thesis will be preserved and accessible in the future.

Each thesis in DSpace has two PDF files: a printable PDF, freely available to current MIT students, faculty and staff (certificates required), and a viewable, but non-printable PDF, available to non-MIT users. The option of purchasing a printable PDF file or a bound paper copy is available by clicking on the "Purchase a Printable PDF or Paper Copy" link from the summary page in DSpace.

The entire MIT thesis collection, maintained by the MIT Libraries and Institute Archives, contains over 100,000 doctoral, master's and select bachelor's theses completed between the years of 1868 and 2005. The 11,000 theses in DSpace represent those that have been digitized since 1999, when the MIT Libraries began scanning theses on demand. Earlier collaborations with MIT departments also resulted in the electronic submission of several hundred theses. In 2004, the Libraries began scanning all new theses submitted to the Libraries and will continue to do so and add them to the DSpace archive. Recent MIT graduates or students about to complete their degree, may also submit their theses directly to DSpace by following the instructions found at: http://web.mit.edu/etheses.

DSpace is a unique digital repository that was created in 2002 by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard to capture, preserve, and share MIT's intellectual output with the world. Developed as an open source software platform, DSpace has been implemented and adapted by hundreds of institutions around the globe. In addition to the new collection of MIT theses, the content in DSpace continues to grow—it currently contains the digital works of 49 communities representing collections of MIT faculty, researchers, labs and centers. To find out more about DSpace or the MIT Theses in DSpace project, contact dspace-help@mit.edu or visit http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/.