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And are there any restrictions on this sort of behavior? Are some universities somewhat more reluctant to let students from other universities loan the PhD theses of their students?
InquilineKea
I can only speak to microform copies of theses (I work in InterLibrary Loan at a Canadian university, and that is all I have ever had to deal with so far). In our case, we won't copy the entire thing for you, because that breaks copyright, but we will send you the microform for you to use, under normal borrowing rules.
We are doing our utmost to make this question moot by making our student's theses available online: http://thesis.library.caltech.edu/ . Access is naturally at the discretion of the copyright holder (i.e. the student).
Quite often, yes; contact the library at the institution from which the author obtained his/her Ph.D.
Before doing so, however, you may wish to find out whether the author's institution has an institutional repository (IR), an online archive of materials produced at the institution. Quite a few institutions have digitized thesis backfiles (though as Teague Allen says, whether a given thesis is available sometimes depends on authors having granted permission) as well as deposit of current theses.
Less likely but still possible if the author still works in academia: see if the author's current employer has an IR. It's rare but not unheard-of for authors to deposit their theses in a later employer's IR.
It's not uncommon for there to be restrictions placed on the inter-library loan of theses. These restrictions vary, and are typically established by the lending library.
Some university libraries will only loan a thesis if they have multiple physical copies, so as to reduce the risk of "the only copy" going unreturned.
The lending library may specify that your library must not permit you to leave the premises with the thesis.
In addition to the above, it's also possible that the PhD student has specified restrictions be placed on distribution when depositing their thesis. A thesis may be embargoed for a specific period of time at the student's option.
For example, graduate students at the University of Illinois can select from a number of different "release options" when depositing the electronic copy of their thesis:
- Open Access
- U of I Only
- Closed Access
(see Thesis release options/Patent FAQs for more details on each)
Some libraries partner with commercial services to archive their students theses. These companies can then offer access to the full thesis, sometimes for an additional fee or included in your library's subscription to a specific database offering.
Perhaps the most well-known company in this space us UMI / Proquest. See their Finding the dissertation or thesis you need page for a link to a number of their products.
University libraries are making great strides in placing theses online in institutional repositories. This eliminates a lot of the concerns regarding preservation of the "only" physical copy, and can even eliminate the need for an ILL request. Access permissions (you guessed it) can vary.
In summary: since restrictions vary, either contact your local library's ILL librarian, or research the matter on the lending library's web site (try the pages intended for other libraries or those intended for students depositing their thesis).
You may also have good luck contacting the student directly. I've seen recent PhD students promote the public electronic copy of their thesis quite enthusiastically!
This is definitely possible; in fact, this was one of the main data gathering mechanisms used in the MPACT project, which was an attempt to build an "academic genealogy" for LIS.
For example, Cassidy Sugimoto's page.