As you may have heard, the Graduate Council mandated that all doctoral dissertations be submitted in electronic form effective with the Spring 2010 semester. Paper copies will no longer be required. A new twist added by the Graduate Council creates an automatic two year embargo of the e-dissertation from public access, unless the student declares it can be released earlier.
The Library has been working on plans with the Graduate Division to have the e-dissertations sent to us soon after they are filed. We will hold embargoed dissertations in a dark-archive (no access permitted) until the embargo period has ended. If the embargo has been waived, or once the embargo has expired, the Graduate Division will release the e-dissertation to ProQuest/UMI and the Library will create an OskiCat catalog record that will link to a copy of the PDF e-dissertation on a Library server. The Library copy of the e-dissertation will also be archived in the CDL Digital Preservation Repository.
Depositing the UC Berkeley e-dissertations into eScholarship will be considered once there is more information on how this process would work.
Plan 1 Masters degree candidates will continue to submit two copies of their theses on archival-quality paper.
Bernie Hurley (4/9/10)