IMAGE QUALITY IN UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS DIGITAL GEOLOGY DISSERTATIONS FROM PROQUEST

As part of a program to promote and expand access to past campus research and scholarship, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) purchased approximately 23,000 UIUC digital dissertations that Proquest scanned from microfilm. These are being provided as PDFs both within the UIUC institutional digital repository to the UIUC community and via the Proquest platform.

Most geology dissertations contain photographs, micrographs, maps and cross-sections (often in color and often oversized), seismic sections and other figures, images, and plates. These items are not adequately reproduced when copied to microfilm format, and therefore they are poorly represented when microform dissertations are digitized. This content is often some of the most useful information contained in geology dissertations.

Because dissertations digitized from microfilm are inadequate for the discipline of geology, these dissertations need to be rescanned from originals so that high-quality color and grey-scale PDF images can be made available. Administrators and other library staff unfamiliar with the discipline of geology may fail to understand the nature and extent of the problem. In order to document the need for this in-house work, a study was conducted to reveal the extent of problems in the Proquest versions digitized from microform. All known geology dissertations from UIUC (439) were included in the study. This talk discusses the results, which other geology librarians and geology departments may find useful during discussions with their own administrators regarding programs to digitize geology dissertations and theses.