In a back corner of the library basement, is a long stack of empty shelves. You may wonder why this is, where did the books go? Not to worry, these materials are now online in the RDSA!
Currently the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA) makes available approximately 10,000 theses and dissertations written by Rice graduate students from 1918 to the present. Through this collection, a partnership with Rice’s Office of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies, RDSA documents the rich intellectual output of the university and enables people around the world to access Rice research. While Fondren was able to procure a number of older theses and dissertations from ProQuest, not everything was included, particularly when it came to master level theses. Through her work on withdrawing duplicate copies of theses and dissertations, Kerry Keck, Assistant University Librarian for Research Services & Access Services, identified approximately 1400 works that are not in the RDSA. The absence of these works meant that there were significant holes in our digital collection.
Over the past year, the library has worked to pull these duplicate copies, have them digitized and placed online. Scanning was outsourced to a vendor and many library staff were involved in preparing these materials and processing the digital files. A special thank you to:
- Amber Seely – batch catalog updates,
- Andrew Damico and student workers – physical review & packaging,
- James Springer and LSC staff – withdrawing and transporting volumes,
- Scott Carlson – name authority work, extracting abstracts and PDF quality review.
- Sid Bryd – DSpace system batch uploading
To view these newly added materials, visit the Rice University Electronic Theses and Dissertations collection (https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/13110) and then browse under the section “Recent Submissions”.
Please see attached Rice-Master-Thesis-graphs (PDF) for summary by Rice department and graduate year.