Hi everyone,
Here at the ADS we've been thinking about the need to broaden our
collections scope to include the development of finding aids and / or
archival strategies for the academically significant student
dissertations which are produced every year. We were mainly thinking of
Masters and PhD's which create a substantial body of research data that
should be preserved and made accessible, but perhaps we should also be
thinking along the lines of undergraduate dissertations as well.
Certainly it would be very easy to create a central metadata register of
these kinds of 'grey literature' that could act as a finding aid. Here
I'm thinking that each dissertation could have a catalogue record in
ArchSearch that simply pointed to the physical location of the paper
copy of the dissertation. However, provided the student dissertation was
supplied to us in accordance with our deposit guidelines and it passed
some form of peer review to guarantee its quality it should be possible
that we would both archive it and make it available from the library
section of our catalogue.
As I say this is an area we are thinking about at the moment, but it
needs ratifying by our Advisory Committee before it becomes policy. I'll
write again if and when this happens and give details about the exact
mechanism for submission.
Cheers and have a great Christmas,
Damian
Linda Smith wrote:
>
> Dear all
> Together with a few others of you out there I have recently received a copy of a student dissertation on SMRs and it occurred to me that there is no central recording place for the existence of documents like this which will have very few copies produced for obvious reasons. So for instance if someone else aproaches me about doing reserach on the subject I would only know about naitonal in initiatives and any research which included data we suplied.
>
> Is there scope for inclusion in the NMR or ADS for instance and by what mechanism given that an undergraduate is unlikely to want to fund the production of further copies for this purpose?
>
> Merry Crimble to all of you.
> Linda Smith
> SMRO
> North Yorskhire Council
--
Dr Damian Robinson
Collections Development Manager, Archaeology Data Service
Department of Archaeology
University of York e: [log in to unmask]
The King's Manor m: + 44 (0) 7970 862369
YO1 7EP, UK t: + 44 (0) 1904 433954
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ f: + 44 (0) 1904 433939
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