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July-August 2005 Theses Canada
The national theses program at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Established at the National Library of Canada (NLC) in 1965, the centrally coordinated program originally had two objectives: to acquire and preserve a comprehensive collection of theses accepted at Canadian universities, and to make them accessible in Canada and around the world. From 1965 to 2003, the program was delivered in a traditional fashion--paper theses were reproduced on microfilm or microfiche, which were then made available to researchers through interlibrary loan or purchase. Bibliographic records in the NLC catalogue made this type of research document easier to locate. The only significant change to the program took place in 1990 when its reproduction and sales activities were outsourced to private industry. The original objectives of Theses Canada remain the same, but advances in electronic publishing make it possible to provide vastly enhanced access to the academic research of Canadian graduate students. Building on the international trend to publish theses and dissertations electronically, Theses Canada made a major change in direction when it launched the Theses Canada Portal in January 2004. The Portal provides open access to over 45,000 electronic theses and dissertations as well as a user friendly search interface to locate all theses in the Library and Archives Canada collection. In 2004, staff at Library and Archives Canada went on to develop the institution's first Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvester and repository in order to harvest electronic theses and metadata directly from Canadian universities with electronic theses submission programs. The Theses Canada Portal is a popular resource that is used by researchers, students and scholars around the world. Discover it for yourself at www.collectionscanada.ca/thesescanada/index-e.html. |
