-- Replaced by a new archive ---

This is a fairly complete collection of metadata on theses and dissertations (400 level, MSc, PhD) completed at the Department of Geology, University of Otago from 1948 until 2017. Full text is not provided for any items on this website.

Please contact geology@otago.ac.nz with any queries you have about this collection.

Access to full text and hard copies

Hard copies of most of these are available in the Department of Geology thesis library. Most are also available through the University of Otago library. Full text for some projects are available on the Otago University Research Archive (OURArchive):

Since 2010/2011 it has been a requirement for students to submit MSc and PhD projects (not 400 level) to OURArchive. Not all projects are open access with the full text available online.

Access to theses for current Geology Department Postgrads and Staff

In addition to the thesis library we have full text and other data (e.g. maps, digital appendices) for some projects in electronic format. These are organised on the Geology Data Drive in the Archive section in folders sorted by project type and labelled with the unique identifier: e.g. “2007MacKenzie”.

Search this collection spatially

This collection can be searched spatially by going to the new archive.

Data integrity and accuracy

This is a large collection and although a lot of work has gone into carefully curating the data, there are likely to be many issues. Some known issues with this database are:

  1. Missing metadata: some theses are missing from our collection, so metadata is also missing
  2. Missing map information: where it was difficult to ascertain the project area this information may be missing
  3. Advisers: For older theses the acknowledgements section was used to guess the Advisers, in some cases this list will likely contain people that were not formally advisers on these projects.
  4. Abstract: Some abstracts have been keyed in our checked. Others have just been copied and pasted from Optical Character Recognition on the Scans (using Adobe Acrobat). We will endeavour to fix these up over time. In addition some special characters such as superscript and subscript and italic text will not display in the abstract.A PDF copy of the abstract is supplied for each item where we have it.
  5. OURArchive access level and handle: This is a snapshot in time and as such we won’t necessarily have the most up to date information about which project are in OURArchive and what the access level it.

Please contact geology@otago.ac.nz with any items that need to be fixed.

How this collection was created

This metadata has been compiled by Luke Easterbrook in the Department of Geology, University of Otago by collecting metadata from theses and using other data sources:

Thanks to Luke Easterbrook, Sarah Boessenecker and Jason Grieve for their work on this project. Thanks also to Alexander Ritchie and Allison Brown from the University of Otago library for their assistance and providing bulk data from their collections.