Providing access to valuable research: The digitisation of theses and dissertations at the University of Pretoria

The University of Pretoria has, over years of curation, built up quite an extensive list of theses and dissertations (ETDs), most of which are not yet available online. These ETDs are dated retrospectively from 2007. Historically the Digitisation unit assisted in processing requests to have a physical ETD item digitised and made available online, although this was on an ad-hoc basis. During the 2020 lockdown, a proposal was made to start the process of retrospectively digitising all theses and dissertations that are not available online. This process includes the digitisation of more than 50 000 theses that will be added to the University of Pretoria (UP) institutional repository, UPSpace. Digitising this collection will assist in boosting our overall institutional repository rankings as well as increasing the availability/visibility of content and University of Pretoria research outputs. This project was approved, and is currently underway. Itreceived renewed interest and resources in 2021. Thus far, 364 theses have been sent to the UPSpace team for uploading, which amounts to the digitisation of 69 659 pages. The process includes various steps. The first step is checking whether a thesis is not already available onlineand whether the thesis on the master list is in fact a UP thesis. Copyright restricts the digitisation of theses not done at the University of Pretoria. The team then fetches the books from the shelf and sends them to our bindery for unbinding, to allow for scanning using a feeder scanner. When this process is completed, scanning starts and the team checks for missing pages, cut-off pages or any discrepancies during the scanning process. Thereafter the editing process starts, where the scanned files are cleaned and converted to PDF format for uploading. The PDF contains a watermark, bookmarks allowing for easy navigation through the PDF, and it is text searchable