Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) has joined the thousands of research institutions worldwide that contribute to the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database (PQDT), a commercially available repository of graduate works.
Through PQDT, a worldwide network of scholars can expect to discover BGU's doctoral dissertations, elevating the University's profile as a pre-eminent research institution. In addition, the BGU contributions will reportedly enrich the diversity of content available to researchers through the database, which supports more than 200 million searches per year.
Established in 1969 to bring development to the Negev desert, BGU is now a major centre for teaching and research and includes the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies, as well as major research institutes such as the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev, the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research with its Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies, and the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism.
To house its burgeoning research production, BGU built one of the first Israeli repositories for dissertations. Beginning in 2012, it will submit these works to PQDT. ProQuest expects to add hundreds of works from BGU to PQDT each year.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses is projected as the seminal repository of intellectual property and emerging research from the world's great universities. Chosen by the US Library of Congress as the official archive of American dissertations, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses now encompasses more than one quarter of a billion pages, creating a continually growing trove of emerging research and landmark works. Researchers are said to rely on PQDT as both a source of enlightening information and as a pivotal component in making their own scholarly production available to the world's intellectual communities.
