2,000 Theses in 6 months

In the THESIS DIGITISATION PROJECT the University of Newcastle finished their thesis digitisation project. The result will be made available online.

For this project a Thesis Digitisation Team was formed out of three students that selected and did do the scanning, searching and contacting authors, data entry as well as viewing supplements like CDs or VHS for additional data or even existing digital versions of the hard copies.

In the University Library are about 4,000 hard copy thesis archived dating from1954 – 2015. Around 500 were originally published also in digital form. From the thesis post-1995 the formed Thesis Digitisation Team scanned 695 thesis within 6 months.

Main tasks of the Thesis Digitisation Team:

• Scanning
• looking for contact details of the many thesis authors
• digitization of supplementary material
• creating pdf files out of the scans
• data entry

Giving the ScanRobot® a name

We heard from many customers that the ScanRobot® was given a name. So it also happened during this project. The members of the Thesis Digitisation Team named the ScanRobot® John Trevolta, by what it became a member of the team.

Scanning stats

• May to November 2023: 695 theses were scanned with the “John Trevolta”  ScanRobot®  
• Output: average amount of written pages per thesis: 315 pages (blank pages where not used for the output)
• Scanned pages: in average approx. 600 pages per thesis.
• Average time for preparing, scanning and cropping: 32 minutes and 30 seconds per thesis.

Automatic use of only relevant pages

Using pages according to their page type or content is a function that was implemented in ScanGate® already a long time ago. Advantage for example in such project is that you can scan also the blank pages that were in thesis usually on the left side. For further processing ScanGate® allows to select only pages with content. By this you do not miss left pages that have notes or also print (e.g. tables or graphs).

Why using the ScanRobot®

Some information on the supplementary material like VHS and CD was inaccessible due to damaged data medium, aging effect or other reasons. This experience strengthened the team in the decision to use nondestructive scanning over cutting the binding and destroying the original.

Further information:

https://hunterlivinghistories.com/2023/12/01/thesis-digitisation-projec…