Librarians Love Bibliographies

"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com

Doctoral dissertations and theses are fantastic sources for research in many disciplines, incredibly useful in large part for their extensive bibliographies on a given topic. Duke Libraries offers several modes of access to online and print dissertations from Duke and other universities; a sampling is below.

DukeSpace electronic theses and dissertations
Has its roots in University Archives, contains full text of many Duke dissertations written from 2007-, plus some theses and University archival material.

Dissertations at Duke University
This interface is from Proquest; no masters papers included. Includes doctoral dissertations by Duke University users. View 24-page previews of Duke doctoral dissertations from 1996 forward, with a growing number available dating from 1995 and earlier. Download the full text of all Duke dissertations available within the database.

Dissertations and Theses: Full Text
Also from Proquest, includes more than 2.4 million entries for dissertations and theses in all subject areas from around the world. Provides abstracts for dissertations (July 1980-present); abstracts for master's theses (1988-present); and citations for dissertations dating from 1637. Offers 24-page previews of recent dissertations and theses available from the UMI vaults on microfilm or in hardcopy. Nearly one million dissertations and theses are available for download in PDF format, with some 2000 new PDFs being added to the database each week.

Dissertations and Theses. UK and Ireland
Proquest again! A comprehensive bibliographic listing of dissertations and theses, most with abstracts, accepted for higher degrees by universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Date range: 1716 to current. May be searched or browsed by subject or by location.

CRL Foreign Doctoral Dissertations
The Center for Research Libraries acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching, including dissertations. This collection includes the early thought of some major figures in 20th-Century intellectual life, including Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjold, Albert Einstein and scores of other Nobel prize winners.

Online hubs

arts-humanities.net is an online hub for research and teaching in the digital arts and humanities. Its purpose is to advance the use of digital tools and explore resources for teaching methods in the arts and humanities. Another website, Digital Humanities Questions and Answers (in collaboration with the Association for Computers and Humanities*) acts as a community resource for questions that “need just a little more than 140 character answers.”

These on-line hubs appear to be following a model that Willard McCarty from King’s College London wrote about in his 2003 article, "Humanities Computing." In it, he asks the reader to consider that the definition of humanities computing can be seen in a roughly sketched diagram, or, as he calls it, a “rough intellectual map of humanities computing.” At the center of this map is “a methodological commons,” ‘of computational techniques’ that are shared among the disciplines that make up the humanities. Below the commons he lists broad areas of learning (philosophy, sociology, history, etc.) including technologies like digital library research. One of the purposes of this model is to connect discipline groups in such a way as to re-imagine both knowledge and learning. McCarty (and his colleague Short) developed this model by grouping similar disciplines and connecting them to relevant techniques that are imported and exported into this methodological commons.

But the grouping of these disciplines did not begin with McCarty but with Roberto Busa, a Jesuit scholar, who in the 1940's compiled an exhaustive concordance on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. His, Index Thomisticus, was foundational to literary, philological and linguistic computing. Many other computational efforts followed and from them grew research centers like CETEDOC (the Centre de traitement electronique des documents) and ACH* which developed journals and conferences, bringing with them the critical questions that have always been the hallmark of the Humanities. It could well be that these foundational efforts at humanities computing may be part of what is carrying forward new collaborative efforts in many new forms: like these online hubs.

TRLN was cool long before 2CUL

In September 2010, Columbia and Cornell University Libraries announced an agreement “to collaboratively support the Slavic and East European collection development activities of both institutions” using the services of a single subject specialist, namely Columbia’s own Librarian for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. This agreement tacitly ratifies the decision to eliminate the position of Slavic librarian at Cornell. It also represents “the first in a series of resource-sharing agreements” developed through the so-called 2CUL partnership, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative to “support the development” of an “innovative partnership” between these two Ivy League schools. According to the press release, the recently-announced deal “promises to <…> enhance the depth and breadth of Slavic and East European library holdings by better coordinating collection development activity,” thereby limiting “collecting overlap” and “allowing the two libraries to acquire significantly more material across the two campuses.”

What many people may not know, however, is that for over 80 years, the Triangle Research Libraries Network has been quietly, but doggedly engaged in precisely just such an endeavor. And by creating, and recently re-filling the position of TRLN Librarian for South Asia, the members of this consortium have even experimented using a single subject specialist, who works across multiple institutions. According to the job ad that was listed on the Duke HR website, the Librarian for South Asia “develops the collections and provides library services in the interdisciplinary field of South Asian studies at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He/she also coordinates all library activities related to South Asian studies in the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) with the objective of realizing an organically whole federation of collections and services” – a description that sounds remarkably similar to the responsibilities of 2CUL’s librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European studies.

In the Research Triangle, cooperative collection development in Slavic, Eurasian, and East European studies dates from the end of the 1950s. Over the last 60 years, cooperation between Duke and UNC Slavic librarians has enabled both universities to develop a strong collection in practically all areas of Slavic and East European area studies. By the terms of the existing agreement, for example, Duke University Library is responsible for acquiring and providing access to Polish imprints, while UNC develops a comprehensive collection in Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian. In the case of Russian-language materials, UNC is primarily responsible for Russian history and literature (particularly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), while Duke collects comprehensively in Soviet and contemporary Russian/Eurasian history, economics, art, and linguistics. Both libraries also hold important special collections that are specific to or include material on Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe, such as UNC’s Andre Savine Collection of materials on the post-1917 Russian emigration; and Duke’s new digital collection, “Americans in the Land of Lenin: Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia, 1919-1930.” The combined TRLN Slavic collection covers nearly the complete spectrum of subjects taught at U.S. universities—a range and depth of resources that few very few North American consortia, and only a handful of individual libraries, can match.

Anyone interested in finding out more about the TRLN consortium must consult the article written by Patricia Dominguez and Luke Swindler, "Cooperative Collection Development in the Research Triangle University Libraries: A Model for the Nation," College and Research Libraries 54 (November 1993), 470-96; and the bibliography listed on the TRLN website.