Completing those theses, dissertations, and capstone projects is a monumental achievement for masters and doctoral students. These academic projects not only demonstrate student mastery of the research process and of the topic of their work, they also contribute to the greater body of research advancing scholarly exploration of their findings.
Today’s Texas State students ensure that their work is part of the academic research landscape by publishing their work to the Texas State Research and Scholarship Institutional Repository. This repository provides open access to scholarship created at Texas State including theses, dissertations and capstone projects.
But what about the decades of academic scholarship produced by Texas State students before the digital age? Until recently, those works sat in bound books gathering dust on shelves in the Alkek Library. However, the library digitization team is remedying that situation.
Head of Digitization & Preservation Shannon Willis, Digitization Specialist April Martin and a team of students with an assist from the cataloging team identified 6,071 theses and dissertations and have been utilizing modern techniques to digitize this valuable research and adding it to the repository.
“We are currently in the second-to-the-last round of the project where we are digitizing all the remaining theses where we have only a single copy of the item that cannot be disbound for digitization,” Willis said. “These are being digitized in a non-destructive way so that the physical volume can still be preserved.”
April Martin, Digitization Specialist, using a Phase One iXH 150MP camera (not pictured) and Digital Transitions V-Cradle to capture a bound thesis.
The team is nearly half-way through the project and are hoping to complete it within the next year. As a result of these efforts, important contributions to research will be openly available and discoverable.
Check out Texas State’s collection of graduate theses and dissertations in our institutional repository. The Texas State Research and Scholarship Repository also includes articles, presentations, posters, capstones, multimedia presentations and other scholarly achievements from Texas State.
So what happens to those dusty bound volumes of older work? Once they have been digitized, they will be relocated to the Archives and Research Center for storage and preservation.
This article was contributed by Debbie Pitts, marketing and communications coordinator.