Finding Theses & Dissertations

(I posted this on my other blog, but thought it would be good to share here as well.)

A number of projects are under way to digitize theses and dissertations and make them openly available to the wider online community and/or to establish a central access point for these important research materials. Here are some examples of both national and regional efforts:

Australasian Digital Theses Program [access]
- Provides access to both digitized theses and bibliographic information about non-digitized theses.

British Library EthOS [access]
- Aim is "[t]o offer a 'single point of access' where researchers the world over can access ALL theses produced by UK Higher Education." A list of participating institutions is provided on the site. Some full-texts are available at no charge. Free registration required.

DART-Europe E-theses Portal [access]
- Aim is to "encourage the creation, discovery and use of European e-theses." Most texts appear to be available in full at no charge.

Database of African Theses and Dissertations [access]
- Free registration required to search bibliographic database with information on theses and dissertations completed at African universities.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations [access]
- NDLTD is "an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations." Access above is provided via the VTLS Visualizer, a search and discovery system. Other systems available for searching the same collection can be found here.

Theses Canada Portal/Portail de Theses Canada [access]
- Provides access to bibliographic records for theses and if available, electronic texts.

New FMO Podcast

The latest podcast from the Forced Migration Online (FMO) team focuses on Kurdish forced migration in Turkey. Visitors can listen to the episode online or download it.

Other podcasts are available here.

Monitoring legal journal articles

Some time ago, I posted a note on "monitoring journal-reported research" via, among other strategies, generating custom RSS feeds. One journal service that has added this feature since the time that I wrote that earlier post is Current Law Journal Content.

How it works: Conduct a search; the search results page will then display a "feed version of search" link that you can subscribe to in order to be alerted when future results occur that match your search criteria. That's it!

Google Alerts

I have posted in the past on strategies for keeping up with web-based resources. One strategy I mentioned was using Google Alerts to monitor online developments for you. If you have a Google account, you can set up an alert to look for designated keywords in news articles, blog posts, web pages, videos, Google groups, or a combination of news, blogs, and web pages. Results (or matches to your search terms) can be delivered in the form of an email or an RSS feed.

I use a series of alerts to check for literature reviews and bibliographies to include in my forced migration research guide. I've found that while Google often finds resources I'm already aware of or that are already in my guide, every now and then, it will locate something a bit more obscure.

For more information, check out this FAQ.

WebCast: Humanitarian Studies Conference

The first World Conference on Humanitarian Studies begins Wednesday, February 4, in Groningen, The Netherlands. Happily, those of us who cannot attend will still be able to view live broadcasts through a streaming service provided by the university. The service is only supported by Internet Explorer, though, not Firefox and other browsers. Worth trying out though.