All senior theses must be submitted to the Registrar’s office according to the deadlines on the academic calendar. Visit the Registrar’s Thesis Page for instructions. The Registrar makes these available to the Amherst College faculty in advance of the Faculty Meeting at which degrees and honors are finalized.
After degrees have been awarded at Commencement, the Registrar’s Office sends all senior theses to Frost Library, where they are added to the library catalog. Print theses (from before theses were submitted digitally) are housed in the Archives & Special Collections, while digital theses are preserved on secure college servers. The below describes what happens to your thesis when it reaches the library.
Once the senior theses are delivered to the library, catalogers in Archives & Special Collections create a record for each thesis in Discover. Discover records include the name of the author, the title of the thesis, number of pages, the academic department(s), and the graduation year. Subject headings are also included along with statements that identify the work as an Amherst College undergraduate senior thesis. The contents of your thesis are not made available, only the basic information about your thesis. Be aware that your name and the title of your thesis will now be publicly discoverable information in library catalogs.
For example:
Five College Library Discover records are shared with WorldCat, the core catalog for library holdings worldwide, used by researchers around the globe. The same information in the Discover record is added to WorldCat along with information that identifies Amherst College as the only library that holds the work.
After all the senior theses are cataloged, electronic copies are stored on secure network drives. The Archives & Special Collections has collected and preserved senior theses dating back as far as the 1930s, with physical copies housed in Archives on A-Level of Frost Library.
Unless special arrangements are made to restrict access to your thesis, it will be available to any researchers who visit the Archives & Special Collections. As the author of a thesis you retain all copyright; although we will not provide anyone with a copy of your thesis without your written permission, they are available to readers who visit the Archives.
Apart from senior theses by famous alumni (David Foster Wallace, for example), most senior theses are only consulted by Amherst College students looking at past examples to guide their own thesis work.
When a researcher asks the Archives for a copy of an individual thesis, our policy is to contact the author directly to request permission. As the author/copyright holder, it is entirely up to you to grant or deny permission for the Archives to make a copy (copyright = the right to make and distribute copies of your work). As the author/copyright holder, you are free to make your thesis available via a personal website or other means; it is your intellectual property to distribute as you see fit. The Archives will never distribute a copy of your thesis without your permission. Researchers who visit the Archives to consult a thesis are not permitted to make photocopies or take digital photographs without permission, as stated in our use and access policies.
