Dissertation and Theses Submission and Processing

The Library at Metro State University serves as the information hub of the university and acquires and provides connections to a variety of print and digital knowledge resources. As such, the library seeks to collect student scholarship, including master’s theses and doctoral dissertations. The purpose of this procedure is to define a standard process for how the library, working with graduate programs, acquires and provides access to this scholarship to the university community.

Scope: This procedure describes how physical (print) copies of dissertations and theses may be submitted to the library for inclusion in its collections. It does NOT cover how digital copies may be submitted to ProQuest. If you are interested in submitting a digital copy to ProQuest, please email library.services@metrostate.edu for instructions.

  • Directors of graduate programs, per their respective program or college policies, may elect to ask or require their master’s and doctoral students to submit a bound copy of their thesis or dissertation for inclusion in the library’s special collections.
    • To maintain consistency, a student’s thesis or dissertation should be bound per the specifications provided by the student’s graduate program
      • Whatever the specification, the thesis or dissertation must be hardbound, not spiral bound, clipped, or stapled, for inclusion in the library’s collections.
    • Unless otherwise covered by the graduate program, the student will be required to cover the cost of binding.
  • Directors should identify their library liaison and should send a single bound copy of a student’s thesis or dissertation to that library liaison. These theses and dissertations may be sent to the library once a semester, once a year, or as soon as they are provided by the student.
  • The liaison will provide the thesis or dissertation to the library’s technical services department for cataloging and processing.
  • The catalogued thesis or dissertation will be made available in the library’s special collections and discoverable in the library’s catalog.

Note: This procedure will remain in force until such time the Library can provide digital access to student works through a locally administered institutional repository. At that time, the Library will cease to add bound copies of theses and dissertations to its collections, consistent with its collection development policy and the practice of other university libraries.

Review: This procedure will be reviewed as needed.

Originally published: August 2014

Dissertation spec sheet example (PDF)