The second of two short posts about dissertations

We recently received a comment on a blog posting, which asked about access to the Index to Theses in Great Britain and Ireland. This will be considered in the near future. However, as the name suggests, this is merely an index of theses and dissertations - no (or very little) full text is available: hence if you were able to search this Index, you'd need to request by Inter Library Loan, the hard copy of the dissertation. Index to Theses is not a free service either. An alternative that may (or may not) be useful to you is the British Library's Electronic Thesis Online Service -EThOS. This aims to be a "'single point of access' where researchers the world over can access ALL theses produced by UK Higher Education". Here's the interesting bit (emphasis mine):

Many UK institutions support Open Access to their theses, so download of their digital and digitised theses is free to the researcher. A small number of participating institutions may not be able to offer Open Access and in this case the researcher may have to pay for the digitisation

You will need to register, but registration is free. You don't need to register to search EThOS, but you will need to login in order to be able to download or order digitisation of a thesis (that won't necessarily be free). Sometimes however, you'll find a link to a thesis on an institution's institutional repository, in which case you can bypass EThOS. The database currently contains over 250,000 records (Index to Theses contains over 500,000, but less that 1% of those are full-text). Shortly I'll mention how to find institutional repositories.