LOOKING BACKWARDS

October 2012 532 Scholarly communication programs are nearly as diverse as the institutions that support them, and the individual components of these programs tend to be highly specific to the institution in question. Components may include provision of an institutional repository, support for journal publishing, education and outreach programs, researchers on author rights and open access, and the development of open access mandates. Most of these efforts hold one aspect in common—an attempt to support efforts that assert individual or institutional control over new, locally produced content in order to increase access. Fewer programs attempt to assert control over their institutions’ legacy of research and scholarship. This is understandable, as a large portion of legacy scholarship remains the intellectual property of the publishers that disseminated the content. Reasserting control over this content remains difficult. However, two significant parts of the research legacy remain within reach: the grey literature (technical reports, working papers, bulletins, etc.) generated by our departments and research centers, and theses and dissertations authored by graduate students. The University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (UIUC) Library, with the blessing of University Counsel, actively pursues the digitization of our rich collections of grey literature and provides open access to these in IDEALS, the UIUC digital repository for research and scholarship. Beginning in 2006, the library digitized and made openly available nearly 7,000 items of grey literature from its collections. Theses and dissertations, the subject of this column, are a more complicated target as copyright rests with the author, according to UIUC policy. However, historical theses and dissertations remain important to individual faculty members and, especially, graduate students across the country and abroad. While the advent and widespread implementation of electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) programs largely address the access issues for new content, historical theses and dissertations represent some of the least well-disseminated and accessible scholarship generated on academic campuses. Knowing that, UIUC embarked on an ambitious program to digitize the entirety of its historic dissertation and theses collections with the goals of expanding access, promoting the campus’ past research and scholarship, and, wherever possible, connecting with authors (alumni) to provide open access to their scholarship. From the beginning, the library viewed this effort as less of a collection management or preservation issue and more as an effort to tackle broader scholarly communication and Sarah L. Shreeves and Thomas H. Teper Looking backwards Asserting control over historic dissertations