Fri 19 Mar 2004
Post Senior Theses On-line
Posted by David Dudley Field '25 under Theses at 2:42 pm
Why doesn’t the College post all senior theses on-line? It should. All seniors writing a thesis should be required to both turn in a hard copy to the library (as they are now) and to submit an electronic version in a suitable format (preferably pdf, but html would also work). The College, or even WSO, could then store these for posterity and make them available to all comers.
I hesitate to highlight the advantages of such a scheme because they are so obvious and uncontroversial. Most importantly, it would be another small step in making Williams an even more intellectually serious place than it already is.
As an example, here is the senior thesis for John Morrison ’01. Professor Joe Cruz deserves credit for maintaining this himself, but the immortalization of a student’s academic career at Williams should not rely on the efforts of one’s advisor. Another example is Nate Foster’s ’01 thesis for computer science. Williams would encourage current seniors to take their work more seriously if it mandated that their work would live on, publically, for years to come.
It is especially nice to note that Morrison’s thesis builds on the work of Jon Burstein ’98. Professor Kim Bruce deserves great credit for creating a research agenda that enages year after year of Williams students. Alas, an interested reader [Who else besides you?–ed One should be enough.] can’t easily see how Morrison’s work relates to that of Burstein because, as best I could discover, Burstein’s work is not easily browsable on-line.[Here?–ed Gzipped postscript is not easy to browse! For you–ed And the link doesn’t even work!]
Because resources are invariably constrained, it is tough to know if a given proposed improvement to Williams is worth the cost of doing so. But there are some items that cost (almost) nothing and which everyone should agree will be an improvement. Posting theses is one of these.
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2 Responses to “Post Senior Theses On-line”
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Eric says:
Ease of searching (Google can even do PDFs and conversion of them assuming that they aren’t image-only PDFs) is probably one of the greatest selling points of this idea.
There could be an argument made that hosting such a thing would not be cheap, but I would gladly donate to such a project or host it myself and as others to donate.
Or – if it really were such a problem (and I can’t imagine that it would 1) hold much space, or 2) get so much bandwidth so as to be a problem), then the server could simply hold BitTorrents of the files and then share the files out on a distributed network – sharing the load between any number of willing participants.
The Creative Commons might be an interesting thing to look into as well in terms of public licensing for the works.
March 19th, 2004 at 4:12 pmKim Bruce says:
Thanks for your kind comments on my students’ research and for alerting me to the broken link. I have now fixed the link and added a pdf version of Burstein’s thesis. (I know you are anxious to read it in detail!) As you are likely aware, changes in the most popular formats for on-line documents and broken links continue to plague most web sites that are up for any length of time (especially when there is no one spending a lot of time maintaining the sites).
I very much like the idea of having a central on-line archive of student theses, and suggest you contact the college librarian, David Pilachowski about it. You should also contact Jim Shepard, chair of the college library committee.
I suspect that some students would not want to see their theses available on-line, but they could be posted on a voluntary basis. Posting in pdf should also be relatively easy for most students aside from those who have hand-prepared artwork, though one would also have to be careful about copyrighted material.
March 21st, 2004 at 1:11 pm