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
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.