Finding Honors Theses: At the Marriott Library
At the Marriott Library
Honors Theses, in paper and online
Most undergraduate theses submitted as part of the requirements for an Honors Degree can be found in the collections of the Marriott Library. Older theses are available only in paper, with the first (often the only) copy housed in University Archives, part of the library's Special Collections Division. These items do not circulate and have to be requested by Special Collections staff and read in the Special Collections Reading Room on Level 4. When we have a second copy, it is housed in the ARC (the library's on-site high-density storage facility) and circulates just as any other item in the library's general collections. More recently submitted honors theses are available online as part of the University of Utah's Institutional Repository, in turn a part of the Marriott Library's Digital Library. We are in the process of digitizing earlier theses, with the goal of eventually having all honors theses from 1960 to present available online. There are two separate online collections:
- Honors Theses Closed Archive (accessible only to those logged in with a valid University of Utah uNID and password)
- Honors Theses Open Access
Finding the physical copies in USearch (our online catalog) when you don't know the title or the name of the author is still possible using elements that should be part of each record: the phrase "University of Utah", the word thesis and the truncated word honor*, along with a keyword related to the college, department or subject of particular interest. For example, the following search
"university of utah" AND thesis AND honor* AND chemistry
yields (as of today's date, September 17, 2018) 107 results. Restricting those results to items "Available in the Library" yields 82 results, ranging in date from 1970 to 2016 and all available in Special Collections. Of those, 45 are also available in Marriott Library (meaning they are circulating copies), and going through those 45 shows that four of them are also available online.
For assistance
Collections and Scholarly Communication
J. Willard Marriott Library
The University of Utah
295 S 1500 E
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0860
Office: 2110K