BL and CRL team up to digitise theses

The British Library and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) have made 400 doctoral theses focusing on the Middle East, Islamic studies and related subjects available online. The theses – which are said to represent a wealth of UK postgraduate research into politics, culture and society in the Islamic world – can now be downloaded for free by scholars worldwide via the British Library’s EThOS (Electronic Theses Online) service.

'Scholarship today at the major UK universities is a cornerstone of global research,' said Bernard Reilly, president of CRL, which is a consortium of some 250 research libraries in the United StatesCanada. 'Access to that scholarship is of primary importance to the thousands of graduate and postgraduate researchers in the CRL community. We are delighted to have sponsored the digitisation of hundreds of theses identified as being of special interest and value in the field of Islamic studies, and that, through EThOS, they are now accessible to researchers worldwide.' and

EThOS is a partnership between the British Library, the Higher Education sector and JISC, and it supplies electronic versions of theses published by 111 UK universities. The digitisation of paper theses is funded by the partner universities and the service administered by the British Library. More than 38,000 theses have now been digitised and are available free for instant download. Where a thesis has not previously been digitised, delivery usually takes around 30 days.