This page contains information and links describing the policies and guidelines concerning the management, deposit, and preservation of dissertations and theses in IDEALS. Note that there are two sets of policies: those for dissertations and theses deposited with the Graduate College through the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation system since the pilot in May 2009 as well as those theses and dissertations have been digitized and made available in IDEALS outside of that process.

If you are a graduate student depositing your thesis or dissertation, please do this through the Graduate College. If you deposit electronically, once your degree is conferred, your dissertation or thesis will appear in IDEALS.

From Fall 2010 on, all graduate students depositing a dissertation or thesis to the Graduate College are required to do so electronically. After approval and degrees are conferred, the dissertations and theses are made available in IDEALS.

Because these are official student records, some of the IDEALS policies and procedures do not apply to these documents. These are:

• Withdrawal policy: Dissertations and theses may not be withdrawn except in extremely exceptional circumstances governed by the Graduate College.
• Updating documents: Authors and faculty advisers may not update or change the dissertation or thesis once it has been deposited in IDEALS except in extremely exceptional circumstances governed by the Graduate College.
• Access Restrictions: Authors and faculty advisers may not directly request an access restriction through IDEALS. These requests must be made by the author to the Graduate College.

• Metadata Updates: Small corrections to metadata such as corrections to spelling errors may be made through a request in IDEALS. Per communication with the Graduate College, metadata is not considered part of the academic record. However, substantial changes should still be avoided if unnecessary. Metadata records can also be updated to include links to related items, such as a corresponding dataset in the Illinois Data Bank.

To contact the Graduate College regarding any of these policies, please email thesis@illinois.edu.

IDEALS and the University Library are actively digitizing dissertations and theses that were originally deposited in paper. Unless we have the agreement of the author or the thesis or dissertation was published as a technical report or working paper series by a university department, these dissertations and theses are restricted to those with an active netID and password issued by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dissertations and theses themselves may not be updated or changed.

If you have authored a dissertation or thesis in the past at the University of Illinois and would like to see it appear here or would like to open access to a dissertation or thesis already made available here, please fill out the Request to Make Dissertation or Thesis Available in IDEALS form or contact ideals@library.illinois.edu for more information.