Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has announced that it is digitising more than 15,000 dissertations from premier European universities, providing broad, online access to these works for the first time.
Digital discovery of the works from University College London, University of Aberdeen, Cardiff University, University of Leicester, University of Bath and University of Valencia will be through the universities' institutional repositories (IRs). This will be carried out in the fourth quarter of 2013, through PQDT Global, a new resource for search and discovery of graduate works in emerging research areas from the world's top universities.
ProQuest will manage all digitisation, sharing digital copies of the works with sponsoring universities to build their IRs. Works from authors who request broad distribution will be accessible through PQDT Global when that resource launches later this year. PQDT Global will combine content from a range of the world's premier universities - from the Ivy League to the Russell Group. With planned additions of content from the UK and Continental Europe, PQDT Global is projected to grow to more than 2 million full text works and 3.5 million A&I records by 2015. An additional 90,000 full text works are expected to be added each subsequent year, including more than 15,000 works per year from Continental Europe, creating a rich, multi-lingual database.
PQDT Global is being developed by the same team of scholars and technologists as behind ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT), a repository of intellectual property and emerging research from the global universities. PQDT now encompasses more than one quarter of a billion pages and is the official off-site repository for dissertations and theses for the United States Library of Congress. This growing trove of emerging research reportedly supports more than 2 million searches per year and is relied upon by scholars as a source of enlightening information and as a pivotal component in making their own scholarly production available to the world's intellectual communities.
