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Introduction
Until a few years ago, one strand of the British Library's Document Supply Service was the British Thesis Service. This service offered an interlibrary loan and supply service for UK doctoral theses.
In operation for several decades, universities across the UK would send copies of their theses to the British Library at Boston Spa; the document supply service would make a microfilm or microfiche copy and then return the original thesis to the awarding university. The surrogate copy formed the thesis loan collection, and the British Library would lend the fiche - or supply a copy - in response to document supply requests.
Legal Deposit legislation in the UK[1] requires publishers to deposit a copy of every UK publication with the British Library for archival purposes. Doctoral theses are not covered by this Legal Deposit law, and there is no national mandate for thesis deposit. Each Higher Education institution develops its own policy for students submitting their theses, and for making them available to other researchers. These access options can include free open access direct from institutional repositories, interlibrary loan, scanned copies supplied in direct response to a request or a requirement for researchers to visit the library of the awarding institution in person to view the print copy held in the library's store.
The British Library's thesis collection (consisting of microfilm surrogates) was the closest thing the UK had to a national thesis collection; print theses have never been collected by the British Library.
In 2009, the EThOS electronic thesis service[2] was launched: a digitisation and supply service that entirely replicated the British Thesis Service, only in electronic print rather than print:
Institutions continued to send their theses in response to requests.
Microfilming was replaced by scanning.
The "supply" of a microfiche copy was replaced by the ability for the researcher to download the item direct from EThOS.
While the format of the copies had changed, the core idea remained: the British Thesis collection (now digitised) held by the British Library document supply service was the one-stop shop for UK theses. They could be ordered by other libraries or users, and the Library would "supply" them by making surrogate copies available from a single source, often referred to in early EThOS communications as...