In 2016 the Frances Willson Thompson Library took steps to preserve and make more accessible UM-Flint’s graduate student theses and dissertations.

Since our last update we have continued to work on the project and track how many times the theses have been downloaded from Deep Blue, the University of Michigan’s institutional repository. We also helped Graduate Programs set up a work flow to capture newly submitted theses digitally and make them available to a wider scholarly audience more quickly. The process was implemented in the Fall 2016 semester and so far ten theses have been successfully submitted this way.

Deep Blue By the Numbers

• 391 theses were added to Deep Blue between July 2015 and December 2016.
• 159 theses (41% of the 391) have been downloaded at least once.
• 3,223 total downloads, half of which were downloaded between October to December of 2016.
• 123 of the 159 theses (77%) are designated as open access, meaning they are freely available to anyone on the internet through search engines like Google Scholar.
• 119 of the 123 openly accessible theses (96%) have been downloaded at least once; and all of the top ten downloaded theses are open access.
• 3,134 of the 3,223 total downloads (97%) are for the openly accessible theses.

Deep Blue Top 10 Downloaded Theses

Title	Author	Year	Total
Faces of Feminism: The Gibson Girl and the Held Flapper in Early Twentieth Century Mass Culture	Raina-Joy Jenifer Palso	2001	221
Hemingway in Turkey:  The Influence of His Turkish Experiences on His Writing	Neriman Kuyucu	2013	185
Comparing Public and Private Prison Systems	Joseph Shannon Gregson	2000	159
Shadow Warriors: Navy SEALS and the Rise in American Society	Cory Butzin	2009	153
The Cult of True Womanhood: Women of the Mid-nineteenth Century and Their Assigned Roles as Reflected in Contemporary Writing	Laurie Bonventre	2005	149
An American Indian Revolution:  The American Indian Movement and the Occupation of Wounded Knee, SD, 1973	Nicholas A. Timmerman	2012	149
Joseph McCarthy and the Loss of China:  A Study in Fear and Panic	Adam Ferenz	2014	110
Capturing Detroit Through An Underground Lens:  Issues of the Sixties Inside Pages of the  Detroit Fifth Estate, 1965-1970	Harold Bressmer Edsall	2010	99
Ellery Queen: Forgotten Master Detective	Cathy Akers-Jordan	1998	97
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Advance Directives	Melody Williams	2002	78

Going Forward

In 2017 we are continuing the project by reaching out to the remaining authors and preparing the second batch of theses for digitization, which we hope will take place later this year.

If you have any questions about this project, please contact Liz Svoboda at esvoboda@umflint.edu.