Library & University Collections is pleased to announce the upload of around 200 digitised Science and Engineering theses to our online repository, bringing to an end the University’s largest digitisation to date.

Over the last 18 months, almost 5,000 doctoral and masters’ level dissertations have been scanned, processed and OCR-ed by RedRock, a scanning company and member of the supported business framework. Following quality review by library staff, the scanned theses have been uploaded to the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA), where they can now be viewed and downloaded for free by anyone with an internet connection.

The project has digitised over 1 million pages of unique Edinburgh research which was previously only available to readers in the KB Library Store. The collection dates from the early 1920s to the present day, with the earliest a 1923 work by Thomas Cameron, On the intestinal parasites of sheep and other ruminants in Scotland, and the most recent a 2011 thesis from Jannat-e Zereen, Characterization of the role of ACR4, a receptor like kinase in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Now that the collection is online, the Scholarly Communications team will be reassigning individual theses to relevant School collections on ERA. In the meantime, the digitised theses will be stored in a bulk deposit folder and can also be access by keyword search on the ERA homepage.

This project has enabled the library to streamline its mass digitisation workflows and has provided useful evidence to feed into our project to digitise the remaining 15,000 University of Edinburgh PhDs. Find out more about this project at: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/phddigitisation

Gavin Willshaw, Digital Curator, Library & University Collections