Paperless at last: Grad theses go digital
LSU on the forefront of the digital revolution? It almost sounds like the first line of a bad joke, especially if you’ve seen the sort of antediluvian computer equipment certain departments furnish to their graduate students and instructors. Or if you’ve ever had to twiddle your thumbs for an extended period waiting for a spot to open in a crowded computer lab. Or if you’ve been forced to fidget when, just as you finally find that coveted seat, download speeds suddenly slow to a crawl.
But starting this semester, LSU joins a growing number of universities worldwide that require graduate students to submit their scholarly efforts electronically. Printed and bound master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, those weighty compilations of sweat, scholarship, and sleeplessness that loom so large in the lives of graduate students, are in the process of being relegated to the wastebasket of the past. LSU has seen the paperless future and declared that it will work.
Middleton Library, for the time being, will continue to print one copy of the things, but these will presumably gather even more dust than their predecessors since they will now be available instantly to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.
The movement to put theses and dissertations online began 10 years ago at Virginia Tech. This project evolved into the “Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations,” of which LSU is now a member.
The advantages of the electronic approach are obvious. The scholarly work of graduate students from all over the world will now be much more accessible than in the past. Students in every field, in every country, will be able to see what their colleagues around the world are researching and writing about. Prospective employers will take advantage of the new capability of evaluating the writing skills of possible new hires with a click of the mouse. In some fields (music, art and theater come to mind), the content of theses and dissertations will be enhanced with the addition of pictures and sounds.
As of now, 65 LSU graduate students from 27 departments have uploaded their theses or dissertations. These works of scholarship await your viewing pleasure in the “Electronic Thesis & Dissertation Library,” accessible through the LSU Libraries home page. The fields of study represented, ranging from Landscape Architecture to Kinesiology to Mass Communication, are as eclectic as the topics themselves. Consider the following titles: “Pot-au-feu Japan: Foods and Weddings,” “Bounding the Wild Set,” and “Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) in Fishes.” Now, if that doesn’t whet your appetite for some scholarly reading, you must not be a graduate student (yet).
The 90s may have been marked by wild excesses and ridiculous valuations in the stocks of many companies associated with the computer revolution, but after the dust had settled and the bubbles had popped, we still had the Internet. And even with all its many downsides: the pornography, the scams, the junk sites filled with hype and hoaxes — the Internet’s unparalleled ability to deliver information directly to our computer screens, instantly and free of charge, is a milestone in the history of how knowledge is disseminated.
Take advantage of it. Check out the scholarly offerings on the Internet. Just don’t plagiarize my thesis.
Richard Buchholz