About

About this site: Highlights from the collection 

McGill University's history can be traced through the pages of the students who worked and studied here. We at the Library created this website to showcase some of the scholarship and stories in our thesis and dissertation collection and to encourage further exploration.

We invite you to discover McGill’s graduate scholarship and see not only the culmination of effort of past alumni but also their contributions to their respective fields. Read the works of some of McGill’s notable alumni, learn more about the city of Montreal, and discover historical artifacts alongside recent scholarship. We hope you will enjoy discovering this collection as much as we have.

 

 

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About the theses and dissertations collection at McGill Library

• 0.987- the length of the historical print collection in kilometres when shelved in Rare Books and Special Collections
• 2005 – the year McGill University starts accepting theses submitted electronically 
• 41,975 - the number of theses and dissertations that are available and fully searchable in eScholarship@McGill (October 20, 2016)

The historical theses and dissertations print collection at the McGill Library is now housed in Rare Books and Special Collections. It was originally only available for consultation onsite or by interlibrary loan. To improve access across the country, in 1967 the National Library of Canada started microfilming all theses and making them available in their online catalogue. 

In 2005, McGill University started a pilot project to allow electronically submitted theses and in 2007 the Library started making these available through the institutional repository, eScholarship@McGill. In 2009, McGill announced the pilot was a success and mandated that all theses incoming be submitted to the Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies office electronically before being transferred to the Library.

Now with almost 42,000 full-text theses and dissertations available, eScholarship@McGill provides a rich research database of McGill scholarship. 

 

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About the retrospective thesis digitization project

Begun in 2012, the goal of McGill Library and Archives' Retrospective Thesis Project was to digitize all of the print-only theses and dissertations held in the Library’s collection and make them available online with the rest of the collection. 

Completed in the fall of 2016, this four-year project represents a tremendous amount of work and dedication on the part of numerous Library staff. In total almost 7,000 theses and dissertations were digitized in the library representing just over 1,000,000 scanned pages.

 

 

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