The Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF), as you may know, houses the majority of UC Berkeley’s library collections, and services all ten UC campuses through item storage, preservation, and access.
One important collection at the NRLF is the historical dissertations and theses of UC Berkeley, which were produced between 1910 and the early 2000s. In partnership with Google, CDL staff, and the Library Systems Office, the NRLF began a project to digitize approximately 45,000 unique UCB dissertations and theses, making them digitally available and accessible to scholars all over the world.
The first shipment of UCB dissertations and theses was sent to Google on February 9, 2015 and the project is expected to be complete by June 2016. More than 7,000 items have been sent to date and all books will be indexed and searchable on Google Books and HathiTrust. Once digitized, the UCB dissertations will be a significant addition to the digital research corpus.
A few example titles in OskiCat:
- Observations on an inbred strain of Drosophila melanogaster (1922), by Margaret Campbell Mann Lesley.
- The influences of English literature upon Goethe (1920), by Marion Elida Possons