The Ruth Lilly Medical Library is pleased to announce the culmination of a year-long project to improve the accessibility of IU School of Medicine print theses and dissertations in its collection by making them discoverable in our institutional repository, IUPUI ScholarWorks. This new collection includes preview scans and descriptions for over 1,000 theses and dissertations written by IU School of Medicine students between 1953 and 2008. The preview scans include frontmatter elements selected to give users a reliable overview of the content such as the title page, acceptance page with signatures of committee members, abstract, and table of contents for each thesis or dissertation.

Rather than completely digitizing all of the nearly 1,200 volumes, we focused on improving the discoverability of these legacy print theses and dissertations by implementing a scan-on-demand service model in which interested researchers can contact us to request free, full-text scans of specific titles. This will provide efficient and cost-effective access to scholarship produced by IU School of Medicine students, several of whom went on to become IUSM faculty.

 

 

While all these items were previously cataloged and findable in IUCat, they could not be located through a general internet search. Now that they are available in IUPUI ScholarWorks, they can be easily discovered and requested by researchers across the world. If you encounter the preview of a thesis or dissertation you are interested in and would like us to scan the full text for you, please send your request to the Ruth Lilly Medical Library's Interlibrary Loan Department (rlmlill@iu.edu).