As senior undergraduate honors candidates enter into the final leg of the thesis writing process, it is worth taking a step back and considering how their work will be preserved for posterity. As it stands, most academic departments have some policy for maintaining copies of recently completed theses for anyone interested in either writing a thesis or sampling undergraduate research. These collections are usually kept in departmental offices, or occasionally departmental libraries, and rarely span back more than a few years. Some copies of undergraduate theses also find their way into the University library archives. By doing a genre search on Socrates (the University library cataloguing system) one can find, for example, the 2006 honors theses for the Program of Urban Studies, the 2003-2005 honors theses for the program in International Security Studies, and the 1979-1993 honors theses in Human Biology. The descriptions of these collections helpfully inform us of the number of linear feet that are occupied by each (an impressive 15 in the case of the Human Biology theses), but offer nothing in the way of subject matter, author or title.

The University’s current stance toward the preservation of undergraduate theses ought to be reconsidered. The writing of an honors thesis entails a substantial commitment of time and effort by students. The University, and its departments, ought to acknowledge the achievement of its honors thesis writers by developing a more systematic approach to preserve the culmination of their work. At a minimum, this should entail a University-wide policy advising departments on how honors theses ought to be maintained. Further, the departments should coordinate with the library so that copies of theses are regularly collected and catalogued in such a way that students might be able to benefit from their preservation, without having to make some Indiana Jones-like expedition into the University archives. We suspect this might be a more substantive undertaking than our quick description might imply, and for that reason we would support the exploration of more innovative approaches that minimize the burden placed upon library and departmental office staffs. In particular, in this era of PDFs and broadband access, it may be more preferable to maintain the collection as an electronic database. Regardless of the ultimate form that such a system might take, we strongly encourage a coordinated effort among students, librarians and department administrators to address the current deficit in this aspect of the honors thesis program.