The Electronic Theses and Dissertations collection began in 2001 when the University of Florida Graduate School first required incoming graduate students to electronically submit their masters’ theses and doctoral dissertations starting with the 2001 incoming class, after a pilot program that started in 1998.
In 2007, the Libraries began the Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Scanning (RTDS) Project to bring the print dissertations from 1934-2006 to the same level of access as their born-digital counterparts. Authors retain copyright and there is no charge to them for this work.
The initial goal of the project was to make the documents fully text-searchable and easily harvested by search engines, making the full breadth and scope of scholarship produced at the University of Florida available across the world. To see an example of a digitized dissertation, please see Julian Granberry’s 1995 work, “A Survey of Bahamian Archeology.”
The dissertations phase of the project has processed over 90% of known bound dissertations. After the remaining dissertations are online, we will begin digitizing all bound UF master’s theses. If you have questions, comments, or concerns about the RTDS project, please email IRManager@uflib.ufl.edu, or call (352) 294-3785.
In 2009, the Institutional Repository (IR@UF) began to host non-thesis terminal projects in the Electronic Theses and Dissertations collection. These graduate projects fall outside the normal processing of the Graduate Editorial Office, and the Libraries work directly with colleges and departments to load them. In fall 2013, the Honors Program transferred responsibility for collecting and archiving Honors theses and projects to the IR. You can explore the Honors collection at https://ufdc.ufl.edu/ufhonors.