| Theses and Dissertations in the Catalog The recent number of questions about finding dissertations in the CUL catalog have prompted the need for clarification regarding dissertations and theses come to CUL, how we catalog them, and searching tips for finding them in Voyager. Those of you involved in instruction and reference may find the following information helpful. Theses are processed according to the guidelines in LTS Procedure #16. This is a lengthy document, much of which has to do with creating catalog records, but we have included a section about how we receive the theses that may be helpful for you to review. You can find that section here. (It's important to note that Law theses are not processed in this manner. Contact the Law Library for further information about Law theses.) To summarize briefly what information we provide in our catalog records: we record the author's name in the author field, the title as found in the thesis in the title field, and include the word "Thesis" along with the appropriate degree abbreviation and the date in a note field. Subject headings are not given for dissertations processed after 1991, with some exceptions. The best way to look for a thesis is to use an author or title search. If that information is not known, a guided keyword search should be able to retrieve theses even with incomplete information. It's also possible to retrieve all theses from a given year by doing a call number using "Thesis [year]" . This will yield a large number of titles (ca. 700), but should give you a complete listing. As with any other citation, the information the searcher has must be reasonably accurate to retrieve the desired item. Here is an example: To find the thesis "Discourse-morphosyntax interface in Spanish non-finite verbs : a comparison between adult and child grammars" (by Maria Blume, Ph.D. conferred in 2002) without knowing the complete citation, one could enter any of the title words in the guided keyword search field (either "keyword anywhere" or "title"), the author's surname or given name in the "author" field, and the date in "keyword anywhere". I searched "spanish" in the title, "maria" in the author field, and "2002" in keyword anywhere and retrieved the record. If you have any questions regarding this topic, please feel free to contact David Banush. |