Theses

On this page:

• Trinity College Dublin Theses
  • Stays
• Other Universities' Theses
  • Irish Theses
  • British Theses
  • International Theses
• Digitisation Project - Digitising Your Research

Trinity College Dublin Theses

Recent Trinity College Dublin research theses are listed in the Classic Catalogue under "TCD Theses" or they may be directly searched in Stella Search below.

All theses held by Trinity College Library Library are in Stacks, either in the Ussher Library or the Santry Book Repository. Registered students, staff and visting readers must use the Automated Stack Requests (ASR) system direct from the Online Catalogue; non-registered visiting readers should use a call slip.

• Research Doctoral theses (e.g., Ph.D. courses) are held in Stacks, Ussher Library

• Research Masters theses (e.g., M.Litt. courses) are held in Santry

• Taught Masters dissertations (e.g., M.Ed. courses) awarded pre-2004/5 are held in Santry

• Taught Masters dissertations awarded post-2004/5 are not held by the Library

• Undergraduate dissertations are not held by the Library

Trinity College Dublin theses cannot be borrowed and must be read in the Berkeley/Lecky/Ussher (BLU) Libraries.

For pre-1970 theses, readers should first consult check the Online Catalogue and if the thesis is not found, check the card catalogue in the Iveagh Hall, Berkeley Library (PDF 63KB)

Stays

Occasionally a thesis will appear in the Online Catalogue with a "stay" (embargo) on it, meaning it cannot be viewed. This temporary (between one and five year) restriction is made by the Graduate Studies Office on behalf of the author, not the Library. These circumstances are usually where:

• The work quotes extensively from other copyright material e.g., Finnegan’s Wake where the estate of the author is likely to insist on restricted access to the thesis in both the print and the digital environments
• The work will be published commercially e.g., a thesis may be published as a monograph
• The content of the work is to be presented for commercialisation opportunities or for a patent application
• The content is the work is sensitive for other reasons

Other Universities' Theses

British and Irish theses, including Trinity College Dublin theses, are indexed in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: UK & Ireland.

North American and some European (including some Irish and British) theses are indexed in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I.

Irish Theses

• Read in the institution's library by using an ALCID card or letter of introduction, or

• Request via Inter-Library Loan

British Theses

• Available electronically via the Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) (from all universities except Cambridge)

• Register at the site to search and download items

• UK theses are free to download after requested once and digitised

• For others use Inter-Library Loan to obtain at subsidised cost

International Theses

Many universities are digitising their research output and making it freely available via an "institutional repository" such as the Trinity Access Repository Archive (TARA), linked from the university's library homepage. Some institutions have collaborated to produce portals, such as the DART-Europe and Australian Digital Theses (ADT) projects.

If an international thesis is not available freely online contact the Inter-Library Loan Office.

Digitisation Project - Digitising Your Research

As part of its strategy to enhance electronic access to its collections, the Library has recently completed a feasibility project to digitise over two hundred theses, mainly on subjects in History and History of Art Ph.D. This group of Ph.D and M.Litt theses was submitted over the past sixty years. It includes research on subjects from the history of medieval warfare, freemasonry, hedge schools, clothing design and manufacture, to botanic illustration and early Irish wood sculpture.

The plan is to make all of these theses fully available in TARA, the University’s Institutional Digital Archive which is managed in the Library - they will be fully indexed in Google and other search engines and will promote the research activity of Trinity’s alumni.

The copyright remains with the original authors and the present conditions requiring full acknowledgement in any reference to the work will remain.

The Library regards this as an exciting opportunity to give great exposure to higher degree dissertations, but it is important to give any alumni an opportunity to withhold their thesis from such exposure, if they wish. It will be impractical to contact all individual authors, but as the intention of the process is to promote the work of the authors and of Trinity by making the material widely available without charge, we hope that most authors will be happy with this scheme. A full list of the titles included in the Project is available (PDF 173KB).

Please contact us at thesispr at tcd.ie