Etd and Repositories

Etd and Repositories

Jean-Claude Guédon

Theses and dissertation repositories do not always locate themselves easily within institutional repositories. The fundamental question is whether they represent genuine research results, or just a ritualized step toward the granting of a degree. The argument presented here is that masters theses should not generally be treated as research results (although exceptions can be made for excellent pieces of work, and procedures devised to accommodate such exceptions), but that doctoral dissertations should. Furthermore, such documents can be submitted to various forms of evaluation that would help enhance the attractiveness of institutional repositories. Finally, dissertations provide an excellent testbed to design new forms of data and knowledge mining. In other words, dissertations on-line helps us move toward the Web 2.0.

2006