An interesting statistic from Owen Stephens, who is project director for the EthOS project to make British PhD theses available online (and who picked up and commented on my post about the project – clearly a man on top of his game). Making theses available online has quite an impact:
To give some indication of the difference this can make, the most popular thesis from the British Library over the entire lifetime of the previous ‘Microfilm’ service was requested 58 times. The most popular electronic thesis at West Virginia University (a single US University) in the same period was downloaded over 37,000 times.
I rather think the EThOS project will be a howling success. More details on Owen’s blog.