CRL and the British Library have made available online 400 doctoral theses focusing on the Middle East, Islamic studies, and related subjects. The theses—which represent a wealth of UK postgraduate research into politics, culture, and society in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and North Africa—can now be downloaded for free by scholars worldwide via the British Library’s EThOS (Electronic Theses Online) service (http://ethos.bl.uk/)

For more than half a century, dissertations and theses from universities outside North America have been a focus of CRL collecting activities; now the organization is collaborating with the British Library to provide access to advanced research from UK universities in a field in which scholarly interest continues to be intense.

EThOS is a partnership between the British Library, the Higher Education sector, and the Joint Information Systems Committee, and it supplies electronic versions of theses published by 111 UK universities. It has seen demand for theses increase tenfold as digitized copies replace microfilm and paper copies. The digitization of paper theses is funded by the partner universities and the service is administered by the British Library. More than 38,000 theses have now been digitized and are available free for instant download. When a thesis has not previously been digitized, delivery usually takes around 30 days.