Campus Connection

UW-La Crosse librarian’s initiative makes health, performance research more readily available through libraries

A growing collection of critical research in human health and performance is now more readily available thanks to a UW-La Crosse librarian. Students, researchers and others worldwide can find the research through a newly networked library system. OregonPDF in Health & Performance, from the University of Oregon, has been collecting and sharing graduate theses and dissertations with subscribers and individual faculty, students and researchers in many fields related to physical activity since 1948. In 2008, the collection went digital. Currently over 60 subscribing libraries in the U.S. and abroad, and over 100 countries each year, gain online access to the more than 11,000 dissertations and theses in the Collection via the OregonPDF web site. Like other independent academic resources collections, OregonPDF has struggled with making their collection broadly visible throughout academia. Beyond the 60 subscribing libraries, librarians, faculty, students and researchers have been unlikely to find the theses and dissertations in the collection unless through citations in other papers or by individual recommendation. That all changed this summer thanks to William Doering, a systems and metadata librarian at UW-La Crosse’s Murphy Library. Doering, whose job includes cataloging and making data records available through library search systems, edited and converted the publisher’s information for each item into an easy, usable standard used by all libraries. OregonPDF Publisher, Peter Thompson, says the change will benefit many. "We were enthusiastic and very pleased to cooperate with William Doering's initiative and action that has enabled our unique Collection to be more easily open to discovery and access for the benefit of all," says Thompson. Doering successfully lobbied to have the 11,000+ records included in a centralized database used by many academic libraries. Now, the theses and dissertations in the OregonPDF collection will appear when people search the catalogs of thousands of libraries in the U.S. and worldwide. Doering is excited about the additional exposure. “We’ve been subscribing to this great collection for 50 years, and many of our students’ theses are in the Collection, so I thought this would be a rewarding and worthwhile project,” he explains. “Also, this collection spans everything from biomechanics of exercise, recreation, obesity, sports psychology, and much more, so now I’m hoping more researchers who don’t specifically know about the collection will discover more relevant theses as they’re doing their research in these many related fields.” Students and researchers will find the theses and dissertations in the OregonPDF in Health & Performance collection through their participating library’s online catalog or at: www.oregonpdf.org.