About 100 of the nearly 3,150 theses in the University Library collection will be added to Humboldt Digital Scholar (HDS), with plans to digitize more as funding becomes available. HDS is an online repository of student, faculty and staff scholarship and research created by the Library in 2005 and available to researchers around the world.
The electronic collection improves scholarship visibility, exposes prospective students to undergraduate and graduate research opportunities at Humboldt and allows faculty members to freely publish their research within copyright limits.
“It’s an innovative scholarly publishing paradigm that’s been extremely successful,” says University Library Dean, Teresa Grenot.
The repository digitally houses over 750 items submitted by HSU faculty, students, and staff, including theses, published and unpublished faculty research, multimedia items such as videos of campus lectures and radio clips from KHSU and cutting-edge research and lectures from the Schatz Energy Research Center. There are currently 12 research communities in HDS including the Center for Indian Community Development, Humboldt Bay and the Institute for Spatial Analysis. Student theses presently comprise about 71 percent—or 546 items—of the collection.
HSU was the first university in the 23-campus California State University (CSU) system to implement an online institutional repository for student, faculty and staff research, says Grenot. The program has expanded into CSU ScholarWorks, a system-wide institutional repository of research and scholarship from the CSU community.
HDS is linked with several popular research repositories, including OAIster, and WorldCat, a global library catalog, as well as Google Scholar. Student and faculty research on water-related topics, such as marine mammals, environmental systems and fish and wildlife, is cataloged in the Western Waters Digital Library.
HDS improves research accessibility by allowing users around the world to access a document instantly with the click of a mouse. In a typical month, items in the collection are viewed more than 7,400 times, according to data compiled by the Library.
“We frequently receive requests for older theses and we regularly hear from students and researchers that they especially appreciate the availability of an online version,” says Librarian Wayne Perryman. “An online document has much more visibility than one that is sitting on a shelf in our collection.”
Library staff and student assistants have already begun converting print theses into PDF files to load onto HDS. The Library has digitized more than 30 pre-2005 theses and is planning to scan an additional 80 by year’s end, says Associate Librarian, George Wrenn. Over 80 percent of current students typically elect to include their thesis in HDS and the response from alumni authors has been overwhelmingly positive, Wrenn says.
The project is being funded through the Humboldt Loyalty Fund, which includes gifts from alumni and other supporters.
For more information on HDS, visit humboldt-dspace.calstate.edu.
Faculty, students and staff interested in providing permission to digitize their research, or alumni interested in providing permission to include their thesis in HDS are encouraged to contact HDSadministrator@humboldt.edu.