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Comment by pentamassiv | Hacker News Reader

My dad's PhD is listed on Google scholar, but not digitalized. Although I never read it (I don't understand it) I would like it to get preserved. All universities should provide digital copies of their students bachelor's and masters thesis as well as PhDs. Data storage is so cheap these days

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>> All universities should provide digital copies of their students bachelor's and masters thesis as well as PhDs

I'm not sure that is healthy, not for undergraduates. I'm all for open access to knowledge, but I question how much knowledge is actually in the average undergraduate thesis. I think a greater danger exists in people being held to things they said while an undergraduate student.

Famously, some of the stuff written by president Obama while he was a law student at Harvard has not been released, nor should it be. We shouldn't hold people for a lifetime to the incorrect, dangerous, or just outright silly stuff they might have said in a papers when they are new to a subject. Putting undergrad work into a perpetual public archive would also have a chilling effect amongst young students who should be enjoying academic freedom. I cannot remember 99% of the stuff I wrote as an undergraduate, but I know that somewhere in there is something horrible that I am glad to have forgotten.

Or we could try to accept that everyone makes mistakes and that's fine. Scientific advancement is basically making slightly fewer mistakes.

My bachelor's thesis was pretty terrible and there probably is not much to learn from it for an expert. It would have been helpful to me to read other peoples thesis when I was a student though and maybe that would have led to a better outcome.

At least here in Germany, a lot of the funding to do the research comes from the government. As a tax payer, I'd like to be able to know the outcome of the research. I am sure there are some real gems in there too.

If a student has reasonable concerns, I would be fine with it not getting published. I believe that the default should be that it gets published.

Ha My university (University of Florida) doesn't even keep it's graduation records. They have an error in my 30 year old graduation records but it has been impossible to fix because they don't maintain the records anymore, at some point they outsourced it to a 3rd party who is almost impossible to contact.

logging into a long dormant account to say i went to uf and there were hard copies of masters theses sitting on a shelf in the corner of one of my classrooms dated to the 70s. sounds about right for them to mess up.

There are strict legal rules about educational records.

While PhD theses are typically quite straight forward, i.e. at many (most) universities a PhD needs to be a proper publication often with an associated IBAN and with a copyright licence assigned to the University (or at least a number of hard copies given to the University library), masters and bachelor theses differ considerably. Often the copyright fully belongs to the students, they are not required to be published (often even are not supposed to be, as they were done at some industry partner, or results have not been published in journals yet due to time constraints...). So it's legally not that easy for universities to publish or even archive them especially in retrospect.

Shodh ganga in India does that on a national level.

https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in:8443/jspui/browse?type=ti...

I'm guessing most recent dissertations have been digitized, but this is probably the norm only in the last 10-15 years? Most universities likely have never given thought to digitize anything from before then due to the extra costs that would be involved in digitizing those physical copies. I am curious how much such an effort would cost though.

Everything was digital at UC Berkeley back in the early 1990s and before.

> Everything was digital at UC Berkeley back in the early 1990s and before.

I can't believe I have to say this, but not every university is UC-Berkeley. Digitization isn't free and requires specialized labor and technology.

And are you really saying that in the late 1980s, all dissertations were submitted digitally? In what format?

I should have qualified this with "the engineering departments at UC Berkeley". Everything we put out (papers, technical reports, open source software) was on the Internet. Formats were varied; LaTeX and Postscript were commonly used. PDF a bit later.

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