The University of Florida has required 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. 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. Please note that authors retain copyright and there is no cost for this service. The Libraries provide complete support for this project. To see an example of a digitized dissertation, please see Julian Granberry’s 1995 work, “A Survey of Bahamian Archeology.” By current estimates, the Libraries should finish digitizing all available bound dissertations by 2022, at which point we will begin the second phase of the project: 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 ufdissertations@uflib.ufl.edu, or call (352) 294-3785.
In 2009, the IR@UF began to host non-thesis terminal projects. These projects fall outside the normal processing of the Graduate Editorial Office, and the Libraries work directly with colleges to load these items. Technical requirements for these works are available at Projects in Lieu of Theses (PILOTs).