An Unimpressive EThOS from the British Library

One of the hundreds of posts in my feed-reader this morning was about the British Library electronic theses service (via SCIT blog). As my own thesis should be included I decided to indulge in a bit of vanity searching. Result: EThOS has a long way to go.

I would expect my thesis to turn up for the term 'webometrics', in fact it is about the only term for which someone might actually want to read it. Unfortunately the only webometric thesis belongs to Xuemei Li:

My thesis does however turn up for the wholly inappropriate 'bibliometrics':

Seemingly the reason for my appearance under 'bibliometrics' and not 'webometrics' is that 'bibliometrics' appears in my abstract whereas 'webometrics' does not. Whilst this may seem reasonable at first, theorectically the University of Wolverhampton are taking part in the project and their record includes a number of keywords carefully selected me, including 'webometrics'. The British Library also fails to provide a link to my thesis, despite it being scattered over the web like confetti: "Not yet available for download".

Young academics brought up on Google Scholar, with full text searching and links to the numerous copies on the web, are unlikely to see the value in EThOS and its traditional OPAC style. Whilst I'd like to see an electronic thesis online service that seperates the wheat from the chaff, with full text searching and links to the documents, and believe that librarians could aid in retrieval with classification of such documents, this is not what EThOS is currently offering. It's still in Beta, and likely to improve, but it has a frighteningly long way to go and you do wonder whether they should have buddied up with one of the big search engines to produce a more user friendly version.