The Temple University Libraries, in partnership with the Temple University Graduate School, is pleased to announce that all doctoral dissertations completed at Temple University will be freely available online through the University Libraries newly launched Digital Collections website. All dissertations completed at Temple, beginning August 2008, are added to this digital repository. Several dozen dissertations have already been made accessible through this website. Temple doctoral candidates are now able to complete all their work electronically, submit it for review in electronic format and have it permanently archived at the Library as a born-digital document. As part of this shift to all-digital disserations the Libraries will no longer add paper copies of Temple dissertations to the Library stacks nor will it collect dissertations on microfilm. The versions of the dissertations available through the Library’s Digital Collections website are the original and complete versions of the dissertation. Dissertations accessed through the ProQuest Digital Dissertations database may be subject to some editing changes performed by ProQuest.

Users worldwide can now search by keyword the full-text of all the dissertations uploaded into our new dissertations repository powered by CONTENTdm software. One can also browse, search by committee member and advisor, and sort by subject and date. Full-text content is presented in the standard Adobe Acrobat .pdf format so the dissertations are individually searchable and printable. All Temple Dissertations will continue to be indexed by the authoritative international database Digital Dissertations (formerly known as Dissertation Abstracts) to which Temple and many other universities subscribe, but now they will also be directly accessible to any Web user free of charge. Many other leading research universities have created similar “open-access” electronic dissertation repositories and have found that cutting-edge doctoral research is more frequently read and cited as a result of making dissertations globally available in an open-access repository. For example, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently reported their open-access dissertations are downloaded sixty times more frequently than are restricted versions offered through the institutional subscription to Digital Dissertations.

In addition to doctoral dissertations, the University Libraries’ Digital Collections website will continue to bring you access to thousands of scanned study versions of photographs, slides, and posters held by the Temple University Libraries. For more information or to provide feedback about either Temple University Libraries’ e-dissertations project or its Digitial Collections please contact either Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, or Jonathan LeBreton, Senior Associate University Librarian.