Theses Canada Portal – Online Dissertations
Further to my previous post (making my LL.M. thesis available online), some readers may not have yet bookmarked the Theses Canada Portal website from Library and Archives Canada.
The mission of Theses Canada is to “acquire and preserve a comprehensive collection of Canadian theses at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), to provide access to this valuable research within Canada and throughout the world.” Increasingly, you will find recent Canadian Master’s and Doctoral theses online (in full-text). For example, I did a title keyword search using “internet” and “law” at this site and uncovered, among other things, the following recent thesis, available in PDF:
Zizic, Bojana, 1972-. Copyright infringement occurring over the internet [microform] : choice of law considerations. — Ottawa : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001.
A more extensive online database of theses is the Proquest Digital Dissertations database, available at the University of Toronto and many other libraries (by subscription). This database covers all of North America and purports to provide full-text theses from 1997 to current (see the U of T bibliographic description here).
Thank you for pointing this out, Ted. I couldn’t resist looking up the catalogue record for my MA thesis, completed in 1989: http://tinyurl.com/afdx7
It is quite amusing. The subject matter has definitely *not* stood up to the test of time!
That is quite amusing. But you have definitely stood up to the test of time, better than your subject!
Cringeworthy looking back at what one was writing at that time, about the need to build a uniform search interface, and that Windows wasn’t really fit to be relied on.
None of us foresaw the web.
And we’re likely overlooking something now too.
Hee hee. While a graphic web interface was not on the radar at the time, certainly the web as text and with hyperlinks was well in the works. I talked to people via NetNorth while conducting my research, and certainly was using listservs as far back as 1988. Some of my pre-web messages are now forevermore archived on the web, much to my chagrin! Here is a particularly funny question: http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v02/0320.html (see bottom half of the page).