Dissemination and preservation of French print and electronic theses

Résumé En Fr

How do you discover and locate a French thesis, how do you get hold of a paper copy and how do you access the full text of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDS)? What are the catalogues and databases referencing theses? Where are the archives, and are they open? What is the legal environment that rules the emerging structures and tools? This paper presents the former database for print theses “Téléthèses” that merged with the national academic union catalogue “Sudoc”, and gives an overview on initiatives for open archives and repositories for electronic theses and dissertations as well as the national program for these documents (STAR). Practical council is provided for the search of French theses, legal and metadata aspects are discussed, seven OAI-projects are presented in detail (CITHER, Cyberthèses, IRIS, INRIA, Mathdoc, PASTEL, TEL-HAL), and a glossary is added for some French acronyms. The article is an updated and revised version of our communication presented at the GL6 conference in 2004.

L'article décrit le dispositif français pour la collecte, conservation et diffusion des thèses imprimées et électroniques. Il contient des conseils pratiques pour la recherche des thèses, une bibliographie, un glossaire et, dans l'annexe, des fiches de sept projets d'archives ouvertes avec des thèses électroniques.