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ETD Preservation and Access Service: California Digital Library

Overview

The California Digital Library provides preservation and access services to the UC campus libraries for stewarding electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) authored by UC students. CDL’s ETD service integrates the eScholarship access interface with the UC Libraries Systemwide ILS (Ex Libris Alma) and the Merritt digital preservation repository, providing enhanced discoverability, bibliographic records and access tools, as well as long-term preservation.

California Digital Library ETD Workflow as of 2026

As of January 2026, the Publishing, Archives & Digitization team (PAD) at CDL launched an updated ETDs service. A complete description of the service workflow is available on the eScholarship Support website in this article. An FAQ is also available to address general questions regarding ETDs in eScholarship.

Costs

Charges for use of the service are limited to UC3’s cost of storage for the Merritt repository, which is currently $150 per terabyte per year and is expected to decrease over time. Typical storage charges for a campus ETD collection in Merritt, which houses all electronic theses and dissertation files for the campus, typically range from $45-$75 a year.

Providing Public Access

Public access to submitted UC ETDs is provided through eScholarship. In addition to direct end-user access, ETDs on eScholarship are indexed by major search engines alongside other eScholarship content and monthly usage statistic are generated for analysis purposes.

ETDs can be browsed to as a discrete collection for all campuses, explored as a series for a given campus, found in eScholarship search results and discovered in Google and Google Scholar searches, where all eScholarship content is indexed.

The eScholarship website uses an associated ProQuest metadata record as a source for metadata elements displayed with each ETD:

ETD Specific Metadata

  • Acceptance date
  • Degree
  • Advisor
  • Committee members
  • Embargo date—embargoed items have a metadata only display that indicates when the embargo expires.

eScholarship Selected Display Features

  • PDF online viewing/reading
  • PDF download
  • Supplemental file listing and download (files can be of any type)
  • Document level metrics
  • Sharing via social networks and email
  • Citation tools

Reports

eScholarship generates monthly data regarding submission activity and end-user requests (views and downloads) for all content published on the site, including ETDs. Administrators wishing to receive an emailed link to these reports (available in HTML and as an Excel spreadsheet) should contact help@escholarship.org. Alternatively, the report for the previous month, which also includes historical data, can be downloaded at anytime directly from eScholarship:

Questions?

All questions related to ETDs and ETD updates should sent to help@escholarship.org.