14,000 items in the St Andrews Research Repository
It has been a hectic summer for the St Andrews Research Repository. At the beginning of May we added our 12,000th item to the repository (Pagano , P , Mackay , D H & Yeates , A R 2018 , ‘ A new technique for observationally derived boundary conditions for space weather’.) Since then, in addition to the regular addition of research publications and current theses, a project to add digitised copies of older theses has been well under away – and to such an extent that the repository passed 13,000 items before anyone noticed! So just a little over two months after we celebrated our last landmark an additional two thousand items have been added to reach 14,000 items in the St Andrews Research Repository.
The goal of the aforementioned project has been to digitise all of the Library’s postgraduate theses from before 2007, (the year the University made a mandatory requirement for an electronic copy for certain postgraduate research degrees.) The first phase of the digitisation is complete, and it is theses from the resulting two thousand PDFs that have been flooding into the repository over the last two months. A dedicated team in the Library has been adding metadata records to the repository, enhancing the PDFs, and adding subject information to aid discoverability of this wealth of theses that stretches back to 1923. Many thanks to Lauren Fenner, Britta Funck-Januschke, Emily Gal, Lucia Gerritsen, Jack Ogilvie-Richards, and Laure Saint-Alme for their tireless efforts in wrangling the metadata!
The second phase of the digitisation is almost complete too; the remaining 1400 theses are in the process of being scanned this month. We’ll be further publicising this significant digitisation project later in the year via the University’s publications, (both electronic and physical), to alumni, staff, and students.
And so to the 14,000th item itself. It is a PhD thesis entitled, ‘Analysis of patterns of play in association football’, written by Dr Araz Hussain Ali, submitted in the Department of Physical Education in 1990. In it, Dr Ali examines different methods of analysing strategies of play in football, and compares the patterns of play of an international team with those of successful and not so successful league teams. He also examines how these patterns of play differ between home and away matches. (For obvious reasons, the names of the teams studied remain anonymous.) The full text of this thesis is now available in the St Andrews Research Repository via the following link: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15283 .
[This guest post was written by David Collins]