Dissertations 1600-1855 available in full text
All dissertations, that is theses, submitted at Uppsala University 1600-1855 and are extant at Uppsala University Library are now available in digital form in the DiVA portal, Uppsala University’s repository for research publications.
Approximately 13 000 dissertations of 20 pages in average are now digitised.
Dissertations from Uppsala that are missing in our collections may be preserved in other libraries.
Interesting material for research
The reasons why Uppsala University Library digitised these dissertations were several. Most importantly, older dissertations are valuable source material for historical research, and the Uppsala items are frequently on loan.
Dissertations provide scholars in the field of History of Ideas and History of Science with a summary of the status of a certain subject matter in Sweden in various periods of time. The material is also frequently consulted by historians of other fields, such as history of literature and history of religion, and their language is studied by scholars of Classical languages and Scandinavian languages, for example. There is also a social dimension of the dissertations worthy of attention, as they mirror social networks in the educated stratum of Sweden in various periods of time.
In addition, Sweden has from time to time been one of the world’s leading nations of science within various fields, especially in the 18th century. Several distinguished scholars and scientists are of international repute, and many of those individuals either wrote or supervised a dissertation at Uppsala University. Occasionally a dissertation was preparatory to epoch–making works published later.
Searchability
The images of the text pages have been OCR-processed in order to create searchable full text files. These full text files are of various quality depending on the age and the language of the text. OCR-processing dissertations in Swedish and Latin from ca 1800 onwards has resulted in an OCR text of a high degree of accuracy, whereas older dissertations in Latin and in languages written in other alphabets will contain some inaccuracies.
All dissertations from Uppsala University are catalogued in the Swedish national library catalogue Libris. The cataloguing has been made in cooperation with Södertörn University Library.
Some examples:
- Anteckningar om Westgöta-bergens bildning.
Dissertation by Adolf Hamilton from 1848, praeses: Professor in Chemistry Lars Peter Walmstedt. - Om klumpfot. Dissertation by Seth Valentin Almqvist from 1848, praeses: PhD in Medicine Fredric Sundevall.
- Om Sveriges planer och åtgärder rörande sjöröfvarne på Madagascar 1718-1727. Dissertation by Hans Wachtmeister from 1848, praeses: Professor in History, Literature and Archaeology Johan Henrik Schröder.
- Om svenska folkets beskattningsrätt. Dissertation from 1848 by Herman Ludvig Rydin, later Professor in Swedish Law.
