Friday 28 October marked the end of the first quarter of the Library’s PhD digitisation project, with over 3,000 theses scanned to date.

After a challenging first few months, the project is now very much up to speed and the team have exceeded initial scanning and processing targets. At the end of the first quarter, 706 unique and 2,464 duplicate theses had been scanned, 29% and 27% respectively of the in-house target for the whole project. Added to this, several thousand theses are due to be outsourced, with options being explored for their digitisation.

The team has focussed on the twentieth century collection, which is largely typed (and therefore can be OCR-ed), A4 in size and single sided, although, as you will see from the team’s project posts to date, content and structure vary significantly. Following scanning and processing, the theses are uploaded to a bulk import section in ERA and then transferred to their relevant School by the Scholarly Communications team.

A few highlights since the project began:

• We welcomed two new members to the team: Pete joined the digitisation team in August and Nicole began working as the Project Conservator earlier this month.
• We purchased a second Kodak document scanner, allowing us to double the speed at which we are able to destructively scan duplicate theses. On just one day in September, 46 duplicate theses were scanned (still a team record)!
• In August the team took on responsibility for the thesis scanning service, which allows readers to pay a fee for the completion of a rush order: http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/library-museum-gallery/crc/services/copying-and-digitisation/scanning
• We have come across some very interesting and diverse images in the thesis collection, and hope to provide a small exhibition of these images in the main library in 2017. More details to follow!

If you would like to learn more about the project, or to arrange a tour of the set up, please do get in touch.

Gavin Willshaw | Digital Curator and PhD Digitisation Project Manager | gavin.willshaw@ed.ac.uk | @gwillshaw