Dissertations and Theses in the Digital Age: Communicating with Grad Students

SC Ballroom, 3rd Floor

Since we have been actively entering our dissertations and theses in our institutional repository, students and even faculty are confused about various issues surrounding this work in the digital age. As ScholarWorks librarian, I have started to work with groups of graduate students to communicate with them these issues. For decades graduate students submitted their dissertations and theses to the library and these were bound and placed on our library shelves to be read by those that came into the library or by others that could borrow them through interlibrary loan. Then they were also sent to University Microfilms which eventually became ProQuest. As librarians we need to prepare graduate students to this new digital environment. They need to understand how to use the work of others as well as what will happen to their own work. Publisher policies can be complicated, and if they want to publish their work later, they need to understand embargoes, copyright, open access, author rights, creative commons licenses, ORCID and more. Creative writing work presents its own challenges. New options for attaching research data to dissertations are now available. This presentation will share how graduate students at Western Michigan University are being informed of these options.