The Loon freely admits she doesn’t understand the dissertation as process or the dissertation as genre. The former strikes her as hazing, the latter, aggressively-traditionalist uselessness. (Master’s theses can be just as bad, but in the Loon’s experience often aren’t.)

The dissertation as object (analog or digital), however, she feels she might be able to ruminate usefully upon. Once it is done, what is it for?

The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, relies upon one’s subject position. Universities have different uses than do publishers, who have different uses than libraries, who have different uses than dissertators, and so on we go. Note that the Loon did not say all parties are at cross purposes; they happen, but so do parallel purposes.

For a university, what is a dissertation-as-object? It is a record, first and foremost, in the technical records-management sense of that term. As evidence of a core business process, certain legal and ethical responsibilities attach to it. Imagine, for example, what would happen to the university that couldn’t produce the dissertation of a graduate accused of plagiarism or faking a degree—accusations that do indeed come up from time to time.

The Loon saw quite a few Twitter commentators on l’affaire AHA getting snippy about ProQuest involvement in dissertation management. From the university’s point of view, ProQuest fulfills two (at least) important records-management functions: 1) legal copyright-deposit obligations, as ProQuest is considered an offshoot of the Library of Congress for give-the-LoC-two-copies purposes; 2) preservation microfilming and storage. A few universities (notably Stanford) have decided to take over these responsibilities from ProQuest, ignore the print-era deposit requirement, or choose other preservation modalities than microfilming; most have not. Some have even outsourced workflow engineering around dissertations to ProQuest. It’s quite reasonable not to like this, or to want alternatives to it; it’s not reasonable to dismiss necessary records-management functions altogether, or assert that ProQuest’s involvement with dissertations is wholly otiose.

Academic departments vary in how they treat finished dissertations, in the Loon’s experience. Many, particularly in the humanities, ignore them altogether. Some treat them as marketing tools, bait for new graduate applicants. For other departments, however, particularly in engineering disciplines, they are important jigsaw-puzzle pieces of long-term collaborative research agendas. Such departments often want them disseminated, particularly if most of their students are off to industry and have no need for or interest in turning them into academic publications. The library term for not-academically-published but still disseminated research is “gray literature,” and dissertations are a noted form of it.

For a library, a dissertation is one more form of what we library-school instructors are sometimes forced to call an “information package.” What do libraries do with information packages? We catalog them, classify them, preserve them, and most importantly of all, get them in front of people who need or want to read them. The Loon is frankly disgusted at the number of academics who implicitly or explicitly expressed the belief that libraries are where print dissertations go to die. This is flatly false. Before one could subscribe to digital ProQuest, libraries lent and ILLed dissertations all the time, and now that one can subscribe to digital ProQuest, many academic libraries do. (Indeed, some librarians raised their voices in lamentation over Stanford’s withdrawal from ProQuest, because in their view it ruined one-stop dissertation discovery. The Loon’s reaction to that was “tough milkweed, librarians,” but the Loon is radical that way.)

The Loon will say this again, because it is important: the academic library’s central mission with dissertations produced on its campus is the dissemination thereof. (The records-management, cataloging, and preservation functions twine neatly into this mission, of course.) Open access to ETDs, and advocacy for open-access ETD policies, clearly fulfill the library’s mission. As with ProQuest, one may not like that mission or how libraries achieve it, but one may not dismiss it, nor assert that libraries and their central mission should automatically give way to any and all other players in this game. The Loon has beak-speared folk for much less.

For dissertators (as the Loon will call them; they span the “student”/“graduate” divide rather awkwardly), much of the evidentiary value of the finished dissertation is actually taken away by the awarding of the diploma (or, for the more persnickety records managers among us, the completion of the official transcript). For no few dissertators, the importance of the finished dissertation ends right there, what happens to it afterwards of no interest whatever.

The dissertation may, of course, have more uses than mere evidentiary value, among them:

• Revenue. Dissertators who complain about ProQuest’s sales tactics when they ticked the “yes, I want royalties” tickybox on the ProQuest form deserve ten Loonish beak-lashings for obtuse inability to connect dots. Your ignorance, dissertators, will not serve you well in the changing world of scholarly publication, much less any other form of communication. Go see a librarian about how the publishing and prestige games work (trust the Loon, nine out of ten of the faculty you know are incompetent to advise you, as reactions to l’affaire AHA demonstrate with shocking clarity). Learn something, and protect yourself thereby.
• Self-marketing. Dr. Jennifer Guiliano memorably addressed this, so the Loon need not, save to note that publishers are hardly the only audience dissertators market themselves to.
• Knowledge dissemination. Yes, some dissertators, despite the awful grind of insular academic hazing rituals, still manage to come out the other end valuing this! The Loon is impressed with Stanford education students for being a salient object lesson.
• Foundation for future research. The curious thing about dissertations in the humanities is that this is not usually what they are. The sciences tend to be rather clearer about this, such that dissertations sometimes even include journal articles; the notion that first publications should be dissertation retreads, while present, is far from the ironclad obligation it is in the tenure-track humanities.
• Grist for direct (re)publication. If you haven’t read this research on the relationship between dissertating and the legal concept of publication, the Loon recommends it. For those with no time to read it, the Loon will spoil it: legally, as best we can tell, a dissertation is published, not unpublished; and for quite some time, academics and librarians treated it so, despite the question of publication scale. The AHA’s evident notion that dissertations are as unpublished as diaries has less foundation in history than they might like.

This final use is the source of all the pushback against open-access ETDs. The Loon hopes she has demonstrated, minimally, that other uses exist and deserve consideration. She hopes to demonstrate, however, that this use is less a dissertator concern than a disguised publisher concern. Unless you can find a dissertator or academic concerned about some other concern than the acceptance of a dissertation-derived book for publication? The Loon hasn’t seen any.

For publishers of scholarly monographs, dissertations are raw material from which saleable objects may eventually emerge. The adjective saleable is key, as press subsidies and library orders decline. Anything about the dissertation that threatens its saleability threatens its publishability.

Let the Loon say that again, louder: no matter how much presses protest that their mission is knowledge improvement and dissemination, they turn up their noses at perfectly good knowledge solely because it is unsaleable. The Loon cannot find it in her wizened librarian’s soul to vouchsafe an instant’s respect to any evaluation system that accepts, much less relies upon or defends, this fact. This includes l’affaire AHA. It emphatically includes tenure and promotion committees in the humanities. This is utterly senseless.

If the Loon ran the AHA, or a history department for that matter, she’d seize on what strikes her as an obvious opportunity to improve graduate students’ chances on the job market: eliminate the dissertation. If books are what the discipline truly values, make them write books! This demonstrates true, not spurious publisher-serving, concern for students, and it also forces advisors and other faculty mentors to take a deep, active interest in the student’s publication process and the state of scholarly communication generally, which strikes the Loon as salutary. But what does a mere librarian loon know?

The Loon agrees that dissertators get a raw deal from the system. She disagrees quite strongly that open access to dissertations is anywhere near the rawest segment of that deal.

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