Building bridges between past and future knowledge, a step towards open science

For several years, the theses and dissertations of the University of Montreal student community have been automatically deposited and distributed in Papyrus, the institutional repository of the UdeM. However, thousands of these documents were preserved in paper form on the shelves of the institution’s libraries. As part of a major digitization effort, the library administration is working to make this knowledge accessible to everyone.

“Even if it is possible, in theory, for anyone to come to the library and review a thesis or dissertation from UdeM, digitization allows these works to be rediscovered thanks to searching the text and accessing them via search engines,” explains Khaled Jumaa. Director of Collections, Document Processing and Metadata, whose team was involved in the massive work of digitization and integration of the papyrus.

Placing these witnesses to previous research online will also make it possible to build bridges between previously produced knowledge and current research, conducted by a new generation of researchers.

Julie Cardinale, the Libraries’ Director of Support for Research, Success and Teaching, places the project within the broader framework of open science: “We aim to democratize access to knowledge – whether from past or current research – to open up science to everyone. . . . That’s why open access is Online is one of the most effective means, because all you need is access to the Internet, wherever you are on the planet. Thanks to the digitization project, more than 33,000 theses and dissertations can be discovered or rediscovered, read and integrated into new research or that will serve as the basis for new projects to advance knowledge Globalism.