Older Uppsala theses all now catalogued
Would you like to read a thesis in Latin written in 1604? Are you curious about Carl Peter Thunberg’s Thesis on the animals mentioned in the Bible (1826) or Elias Fries’s Are the natural sciences educational? (1842)? These can now be studied online, thanks to Uppsala University Library’s massive undertaking to catalogue older theses, written in the years 1602–1855, from Uppsala University.
This major catalogisation task is now complete. The Library’s early theses (“dissertations”) of 1602–1855 from Uppsala University have all now been digitally catalogued in LIBRIS, the Swedish academic and research libraries’ joint catalogue. This is the first phase of the project to make all Uppsala University theses written since 1602 available online in full-text versions.
Uppsala University Library’s collection now contains nearly 13,000 dissertations. Thanks to Johan Henric Lidén, a diligent dissertation collector and bibliographer, it is the most complete collection in Sweden. Lidén’s unique collection, bequeathed to the Library, complemented what it already possessed.
The catalogisation makes it possible to search the material in a completely new way. It is also a precondition for the digitisation of this material that is in progress along with other projects at the Library’s Digital Imaging unit. To date just over 2,300 of the 13,000 dissertations have also been digitised and published in DiVA with those of the present day. (DiVA, the Digital Academic Archive, is a publishing system developed by Uppsala University and used by 40 universities and research institutions.) The aim is, ultimately, for all 13,000 publications to be available to read online, in full text, through DiVA.
Anna Malmberg