Staff members in Belk Library have digitized many of the papers dating to 2007 and are continuing to add more.
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The research of Elon University honors students has been put in an online database via Belk Library’s digital collections website and is now available to be accessed by the public.
“It’s unique that an undergraduate honors thesis is both published in the library as a bound volume and in an online database,” said Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, professor of psychology and director of the Honors Program. “The digitization project highlights and enables public access to the high-quality work being performed by Honors Fellows and their faculty mentors at Elon University. We are very grateful to Belk librarians Katie Nash and Teresa LePors for leading these efforts.”
The honors thesis program allows students up to two years to study a carefully defined question or problem under the guidance of a faculty member from the student’s area of study. In their senior year, Honors Fellows defend a thesis before a committee comprised of the faculty mentor and other faculty representatives. The final product is archived in Belk Library.
Though honors students have been able to submit electronic versions of their theses to Belk Library since 2009, students who did not or had not given the library permission to publish their work online were contacted for permission to do so. Current honors students are now asked to submit their theses as a PDF, if possible, and sign a permission form upon final submission of the thesis, with the option to permit Belk Library to place the work online.
The result of the digital conversion project, carried out by library staff members who are responsible for the scanning, file maintenance and digitization guidelines, is high-quality PDF versions of original theses.
Through optical character recognition software, the content of the papers is searchable for users of the database.