The H.W. Wilson Foundation has announced that it will fund the digitization of the print index Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities (DDAAU) under a new agreement with EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO). EBSCO will digitise the content and build a free database in cooperation with the Congregational Library & Archives in Boston.
The Congregational Library & Archives in Boston will coordinate the management of the project for the H.W. Wilson Foundation. The database will be openly available online and searchable by fields that include dissertation title, author and school. Since DDAAU can be added to EBSCOhost or EBSCO Discovery Service profiles, libraries can also establish custom links to the full text where it may reside for them (in the institutional repositories, etc.).
DDAAU was published by the H.W. Wilson Company from the years 1933 through 1955. This print index was compiled annually for the National Research Council and The American Council of Learned Societies by the Association of Research Libraries. Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities was the only comprehensive record of dissertations accepted by U.S. universities during that period of time.
EBSCO will host the DDAAU database on the EBSCOhost platform and the content will be available via EBSCO Discovery Service but EBSCO will also make DDAAU freely available to researchers on the open Web worldwide.
The database is expected to be available in September 2014.
