Library's Digital Assets Head to Present at National Conference
May 14, 2013
Emily Lin, head of Digital Assets for the UC Merced Library will join colleagues from UC San Diego and the California Digital Library to share knowledge about preserving and providing access to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) at a national conference at Claremont Colleges in July.
The presenters will discuss how UC libraries have approached digital preservation of ETDs and overcome hurdles to enable open access to the final products of graduate students’ research.
UC Merced was the second campus after UC San Diego to make its graduate theses and dissertations publicly available on the UC eScholarship site.
“Open access greatly increases the readership, citation, and, ultimately, the impact of research,” Lin said. While the traditional method of depositing ETDs with ProQuest limits access to those institutions that license the vendor’s database, anyone performing a Google search can find and read ETDs published in eScholarship.
Since the end of 2011, 39 ETDs from UC Merced have been made available on eScholarship, while collective usage has totaled 2,117 views or downloads. More UC Merced graduate theses and dissertations will be made available online once the Graduate Division obtains permission from graduates.
