From October 2017 all new PhD students have to make an electronic copy of their thesis available online. Information about this is available on our LibGuide. Existing and former PhD students can also participate in the new e-thesis service to make our Swansea University theses open access on the institutional repository Cronfa.
We are also awaiting completion of a project to digitize 1000 older theses (see the original news item from June 2017). This work is being undertaken by Proquest and the resulting full text PDFs will be available both on Cronfa and on Proquest’s Dissertations and Theses database.
Swansea University already has over 180 theses that were digitized via part of the Ethos service run by the British Library. This offers digitization of a thesis for a fee and the thesis is then made available for all users on http://ethos.bl.uk/. Our theses that have been digitized in this way are linked from our library catalogue iFind or can be found using the Advanced Search option on Ethos: enter “Swansea” as a term for “Current Institution” and check the box for “Limit search to items available for immediate download”.
The library catalogue iFind remains the main source for all Swansea University theses. The print copies are held in the thesis store and can be consulted in the library (however many of these are away for digitization with Proquest at the moment).
The Library Research Support Team is working closely with our metadata and cataloguing experts to improve access to the university’s theses collection – we will post more information on e-theses over the next few months to support the launch of this new service. Contact us on openaccess@swansea.ac.uk with any queries!