Skip to main content

Identifying, Digitizing and Uploading 95 U-M dissertations into Deep Blue Documents

It’s Open Access Week! While sharing knowledge openly is a public good, this year’s theme, “The Cost of Knowledge,” challenges us to think about the consistently rising cost of that sharing. Who benefits? Who is negatively impacted? 

Deep Blue Documents (DB Docs) is U-M’s institutional repository, which is hosted and run by the U-M Library. It preserves the teaching, learning, research, and creative outputs produced at all three U-M campuses. As of October 2026, DB Docs contains 49,313 digital dissertations, the largest collection in the repository. While not comprehensive, it contains dissertations from 1884 to the present.  Dissertations from the past fifteen years are open access; however, 93.6% published before 2010 are restricted to access by U-M users only. 

While the general public can purchase many U-M dissertations from a vendor, this option is expensive and not economically feasible for many, which relates directly to this year’s Open Access Week theme of “The Cost of Knowledge.” 

DB Docs staff knows that having U-M dissertations publicly available is a public good (see our two other blog posts for information on why free online access to dissertations matters to the general public and how we were able to open access to 10,014 UM dissertations based on their copyright status).

Until approximately 2010, doctoral students were required to provide the U-M Library a print copy of their dissertation, which became part of the permanent collection. In total, the Library has approximately 82,000 print dissertations. While DB Docs staff have made enormous efforts towards making many U-M dissertations digitally available in DB Docs, we knew that there were potentially thousands of print dissertations in the Library’s collection that didn’t have a digital equivalent in DB Docs. 

With generous funding from the Rackham Graduate School, we were able to hire several graduate students to identify, digitize, and upload additional U-M dissertations to DB Docs. Based on these projects, we’ve been able to provide online access to 95 dissertations (including 89 that were made publicly available) that were previously only available in print. 

Weeded microfilm

Many of the print dissertations held by the U-M Library are duplicated in microfilm. These items were rarely used due to lack of access and knowledge of how to use microfilm readers. Collections staff decided to remove these duplicate microfilm dissertations to ease physical space constraints, while retaining the physical print copy of the dissertation. 

Knowing that these microfilm duplicates have print copies, we determined which dissertations weren’t currently available online, had them digitized, and then uploaded the digital copy into DB Docs. 

As a result, we were able to identify, digitize, and upload 81 dissertations, including 79 that were made publicly available. 

Notable alumni

As part of U-M’s celebration of 150 years of doctoral education, Rackham wanted to make as many dissertations from notable alumni as possible publicly available in DB Docs. Rackham provided a list of notable alumni and did some initial research. Using this information, in addition to the U-M Alumni Association’s Notable Alumni list, we were able to identify, digitize, and upload 10 dissertations from notable alumni, including 9 that were made openly available: 

University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology

The University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology (UMMP) has a small collection of approximately 200 dissertations and theses in which students have studied specimens in the UMMP collection. We reviewed all of these items and determined that four weren’t currently available online. We had them digitized and then uploaded into DB Docs. 

Interestingly, while not initially part of this project, we identified four Master’s theses in the UMMP collection that weren’t available in DB Docs. Our collection of Master’s theses is random. We receive Master’s theses for inclusion in DB Docs on an opt-in basis from individual departments. We had these UMMP Master’s theses digitized and then uploaded into DB Docs; however, due to copyright law, these Master’s theses were restricted to U-M users only. 

Merging DB Docs data and Library Catalog data

As mentioned above, DB Docs contains over 49,000 digital dissertations, and the Library’s collection has approximately 82,000 print dissertations. While there is some overlap in these two collections, there are many print dissertations that haven’t been digitized. Thus, one of our current projects focuses on identifying the print dissertations that weren’t digitized and making them digitally available in DB Docs.

To do this, we are using fuzzy matching to find out which dissertations still need to be digitized using two datasets: 1) a list of print dissertations in the Library’s collection; and 2) a list of digital dissertations in DB Docs. Unfortunately, these are messy datasets that need significant data cleaning before we can merge them successfully. Our end goal is to identify print dissertations in the Library's collection, get them digitized, identify their copyright status, and upload them into DB Docs. As this is an ongoing project, we estimate that there could be upwards of 10,000 print dissertations in the Library’s collection that aren’t in DB Docs. We will share the results of this project upon its completion. 

Conclusions

Based on these projects, we’ve been able to provide online access to 95 U-M dissertations that were previously only available in print. 89 of these are now publicly available, and 6 are restricted to U-M access only. In addition,  we’re working on identifying print dissertations in the Library’s collection that can be digitized and uploaded into DB Docs. Our goal is to continue digitizing and opening access to many more historical dissertations in DB Docs! 

Acknowledgements 

Many kudos to Rachel Woodbrook for being the driving force behind many of our projects to make U-M dissertations more accessible to the public. We’re appreciative of the funding from the Rackham Graduate School to hire three graduate student assistants. Without their financial support, these projects wouldn’t have been possible. 

We couldn’t have completed these projects without the collaboration and support of these colleagues. Many, many thanks to: 

  • David Fulmer in the Library IT division for pulling lists of print dissertations and explaining the many intricacies of what these lists included (and didn’t include);
  • Our amazing graduate student assistants, Katie Cutts, Lucía González González, and Remi Foust, for working through a multitude of spreadsheets to identify and then upload more dissertations; 
  • The Library Stacks staff, especially Shannon Moreno, for providing information on the weeded microfilm project and for pulling and sending many, many print dissertations to the Digital Conversion Unit; 
  • The Library’s Digital Conversion Unit, specifically Jeremy Evans and Lara Unger, for their hard work digitizing these dissertations; 
  • Peter Cerda for pulling lists of digital dissertations in DB Docs; 
  • Our former and current Library IT developers, Jose Blanco, Fritz Freiheit, Greg Kostin, and Richard Higgins, for doing their magic on the back-end of DB Docs to keep it running and humoring all of our requests; 
  • Our colleagues who have advised on and supported this work, including Charles Watkinson and Jeremy Morse.

Tags: