The newly digitized works complement Major Papers submitted since 2017, when the University transitioned to fully digital submissions. (FILE/UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR)
By John-Paul Bonadonna
The University of Windsor is making more than five decades of graduate student scholarship easier to find, search and share by digitizing about 3,400 Major Papers produced between 1962 and 2017.
Soon to be freely available through the University’s Scholarship repository (Scholaris), the collection preserves student research and creative inquiry while making it discoverable to students, alumni, community members and researchers around the globe.
The newly digitized works complement Major Papers submitted since 2017, when the University transitioned to fully digital submissions. Together, the collections provide a continuous record of graduate student scholarship spanning more than 60 years.
For Art Rhyno, systems librarian at Leddy Library, the project was about more than simply converting paper documents into digital files.
“For most of these Major Papers, the paper copy held by the library was the only copy we knew existed,” says Rhyno.
“I became concerned that these works were vulnerable. If something happened to that lone analog version, that scholarship could be lost forever.”
Major Papers represent the culminating scholarly work of students in a variety of graduate and professional programs. They often contain substantial original research and reflect the academic achievements of students nearing completion of their degrees.
Among the largest concentrations in the collection are papers from business, education and geography programs, although the archive encompasses a broad range of disciplines and topics. The earliest paper in the collection dates to 1962, predating the University of Windsor’s establishment as a public university in 1963.
The project began in earnest after Rhyno assisted a student seeking access to a decades-old mathematics Major Paper. Working with the document highlighted both the value of the research contained within the collection and the challenges of relying solely on fragile paper copies.
“What struck me was how good the work was,” Rhyno recalls.
“This was high-quality research created here on our campus by our own students. It reinforced the importance of preserving and sharing these works.”
Drawing on years of experience leading newspaper digitization initiatives, Rhyno developed workflows that enabled the library to process the large collection efficiently. Beginning in 2022, he adapted equipment originally acquired through the Internet Archive and designed automated scanning processes that significantly accelerated the work.
Over three years, approximately two-thirds of the collection was digitized using automated methods, while library staff carefully scanned the remaining items that required special handling. The result is a fully digitized collection that has been preserved for future generations.
Beyond preservation, the project dramatically improves access to the content. Previously, researchers could discover Major Papers through the library catalogue, but had to visit the library and consult physical copies to determine whether a paper was relevant to their research.
Today, every digitized paper has undergone optical character recognition (OCR), making the full text searchable online. Researchers can now search within documents, identify relevant topics and keywords and access the material remotely from anywhere in the world.
“This changes how people can engage with the collection,” says Rhyno.
“Instead of finding a title in the catalogue and coming to the library to browse through a paper copy, researchers will be able to search and access the content digitally.”
The initiative was strengthened through collaboration across Leddy Library.
Systems librarians in the Research and Scholarly Publishing Unit leveraged metadata derived from catalogue records created by the Library’s cataloguing team. These enhancements support discovery through downstream scholarly aggregators and services, helping ensure the works are visible within broader research ecosystems.
To maximize accessibility and reuse, the collection will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. The licence allows users to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, provided appropriate attribution is given and any derivative works are distributed under the same terms.
Making the collection openly available also amplifies the impact of University of Windsor scholarship beyond campus boundaries.
“Research created by our students during that time will be discovered anywhere,” says Rhyno.
“These works are now part of the global scholarly conversation.”