"This partnership combines the most-used hosted institutional repository service with a most distinguished research university," said David "Skip" Prichard, president of ProQuest Information and Learning, "We are glad to bring our established UMI Dissertations Publishing, our Digital Archiving and Access Program, and the new technology of Digital Commons together to provide McMaster with a single repository for the entire depth and breadth of their university's intellectual output."
DigitalCommons@McMaster will provide a publishing vehicle for McMaster's faculty and staff, as well as a permanent location for special digital collections. Because Digital Commons is a turnkey system, it allowed McMaster to establish its repository quickly, yet with powerful capabilities. McMaster selected ProQuest's Digital Archiving and Access Program to digitize 3,455 dissertations and theses. Upon completion, the digital content will be available in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, the database of record for graduate research.
Both projects will come together in DigitalCommons@McMaster, which will include among its collections the citations and abstracts of the digitized theses and dissertations. McMaster students and faculty on campus will be able to link to the full text of the dissertations and theses free of charge, while DigitalCommons@McMaster visitors from around the world will have access through their own institution's full-text ProQuest Dissertations & Theses subscriptions. Each author has licensed a copy of their dissertation or thesis to the University for distribution in DigitalCommons@McMaster.
"By selecting Digital Commons as our platform we're able to focus more on our users and their needs and less on the technology itself," said Jeff Trzeciak, university librarian at McMaster . "We can use our limited human resources to focus on the promotion and use of our repository."
Institutional repositories are centralized digital collections of a university's intellectual heritage, making its scholarly works freely available on an open access basis to researchers via the internet.
Digital Commons is a service offered by technology partners ProQuest and the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress), which allows institutions to create peer-reviewed e-journals, provides user-friendly features, and includes Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliance, which makes it easy to locate the repository's content in a variety of ways, including from outside search engines, such as Google.
About McMaster
McMaster University, a world-renowned, research-intensive university, fosters a culture of innovation, and a commitment to discovery and learning in teaching, research and scholarship. Based in Hamilton, the University is one of four Canadian universities listed on the Top 100 universities in the world. It has a student population of more than 23,000, and an alumni population of 120,000 in 128 countries.
About ProQuest Information and Learning
ProQuest Information and Learning is a world leader in collecting, organizing, and publishing information for researchers, faculty, and students in libraries and schools. It is widely known for its strength in business and economics, general reference, genealogy, humanities, social sciences, and STM content. The company develops premium databases comprising periodicals, newspapers, dissertations, out-of-print books, and other scholarly information from more than 9,000 publishers worldwide. Users access the information through the ProQuest® Web-based online information system, Chadwyck-Healey® electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print reference products, eLibrary® and SIRS® educational resources, and Serials Solutions e-resource access and management solutions. ProQuest® Smart Search was named "Best Specialist Search Product" by the International Information Industry Awards in late 2005. For more information about ProQuest Information and Learning, visit www.il.proquest.com.
