ProQuest Digital Archiving and Access Project

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A joint project with ProQuest has recently been completed, digitising over 22,000 University of Manchester and former UMIST doctoral theses. The vast collection forms a valuable body of doctoral research, covering a broad range of subjects, with an emphasis on medicine, materials science, chemistry and engineering. 

Six year digitisation project

This was a complex project, taking over six years to complete, that involved several teams from across the Library and external providers.

Doctoral theses were not being utilised to their full potential as valuable research resources. However, through full-text digitisation and improved metadata and indexing, we have brought together the University’s entire collection of doctoral theses to be discoverable and accessible via Library Search and external databases including PQDTGlobal and DARTEurope. Researchers worldwide can now access this content instantly. Previously, the collection was only available for reference and limited to those who could visit the Library or could pay a one-time digitisation fee.

Access the theses

Full-text access to high quality OCR’d downloadable PDFs can be found via Library Search or through the PQDTGlobal database.