1. PhD Thesis Digitisation Project
Two million images, and counting
Gavin Willshaw, Digital Curator, Library & University Collections
@gwillshaw

2. Project aims Scan 17,000 PhD volumes – online by end 2018
Provide global access to entire PhD collection
Obtain equipment, software and expertise for future projects
Create 4,000 basic MARC records
Conserve 2,000 damaged theses
Free up 500m shelving

3. The collection Largely standardised, yet: Latin / handwritten
Awkward foldouts
Varying size
Damage / dirt
Biological specimens

4. Scanning 10,000 duplicate theses scanned destructively
3,000 unique theses scanned non-destructively in- house
4,000 unique theses outsourced
Processing: deskew, remove signatures / addresses, OCR, generate 300 DPI keyword-searchable PDFs
, cataloguing

5. Copyright / Licensing
Made available open access through Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA)
Copyright retained by authors, not UoE
Currently no right to re-license
Low risk; take-down policy

6. Progress (mid July 17) 7,213 scanned in-house 6,130 processed in-house
5,364 duplicate items
1,849 unique items
6,130 processed in-house
5,165 online
On track to have in-house element completed on time
4,312 outsourced

7. Not just text…

8. Some notable authors #UoEPhD
I think everyone knows some of the famous people whose theses we already held, such as Gordon Brown, Arthur Conan Doyle
Alexander McCall Smith’s thesis in law was digitised a few months ago. We approached his publicist and asked if he had any interesting reflections on his time at the university and he said he had “nothing meaningful to say” but it was a “most enjoyable experience”
We then have Isabel Emslie Hutton, who contributed significantly to the treatment of the injured during the war, so much so that a Serbian postage stamp was recently issued in her honour.
Helen Pankhurst, great granddaughter of the suffragette leader Emeline – now a high profile human rights campaigner
Harvey Pirie, who served on William Speris Bruce’s Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, the expedition well know for the penguin picture. You never know – it may even be him standing there
We’ve come across many members of staff and also several people in the audience today, I’d imagine!
Alexander McCall Smith: By TimDuncan (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 ( via Wikimedia Commons; Isabel Emslie Hutton: By Post of Serbia ( [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Helen Pankhurst: Katy Blackwood [CC BY-SA 4.0 ( via Wikimedia Commons

9. Impact / downloads Theses on ERA downloaded 2 million times since 2012
Theses digitised as part of this project 14,000 but steadily increasing every month – now around 3,000 downloads per month
And the most popular thesis to date, with 139 downloads is…

10. Beyond scanning Linking theses to Wikipedia Wikisource
Looking to explore advanced research techniques (e.g. text mining / data visualisation)
Digitisation very much the priority of this stage of the project but we are also looking at other ways we can use the content
One way of doing this is to link the PhDs with author pages on Wikipedia
We include links to the ERA record both in the body of the text and infoboxes
This page has been viewed 334 times since it was created 6 months ago – the number of downloads from ERA has
We also uploaded one thesis into Wikisource
If you’re not familiar with it, Wikisource is Wikimedia’s online library of out of copyright works
This page has been viewed 107 times – more than 10x the number of times the file has been downloaded from ERA
Difficult to guage the value of these interactions but definitely worth pursuing in more detail
Of interest, if you google the thesis title, the Wikisource page appears above the ERA page
We’re also very keen to explore the use of digitial scholarship techniques such as data visualisation and text mining with this collection – sure to be lots of fascinating trends.

11. Find out more libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/phddigitisation
era.lib.ed.ac.uk
facebook.com/crc.edinburgh
@CRC_EdUni
@gwillshaw
#UoEPhD