Last year, we looked at use of our digitized theses. We decided that a bit more than a year had passed so it was time to look at these items again.

The collection has grown modestly to 258 theses and dissertations. These PDFs have been downloaded almost 55,000 times total (an average of 213.2 times each), from 12 November 2009 (when we first posted a digitized thesis) to 31 October 2015. On average, each digitized thesis is downloaded once every four days, an increase from last year. Our digitized theses date from 1886–2008, with the vast majority dating from 1912–1921.

Each thesis or dissertation that has been downloaded at least ten times shows a count of downloads on the individual page in Iowa Research Online (IRO). This download count appears in all our collections in IRO.

The following items, from a variety of disciplines, have been downloaded more than 1000 times each. These high use items are by graduates from as early as 1913 and to as recently as 2008.

Graduation Year	Title	Author	Degree	Use/Day	Total Downloads
1961	The Production book of “The Diary of Anne Frank”	Allan Kurtz Longacre II	Master of Arts, Speech and Dramatic Arts	3.73	5,794
2008	Teacher-initiated talk and student oral discourse in a second language literature classroom : a sociocultural analysis	Joshua J. Thoms	Doctor of Philosophy, Second Language Acquisition	5.39	4,387
1949	A formal analysis of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale romance	Lewis Dwight Levang	Master of Arts, English	3.24	2,099
1931	The catenary	J. P. Kacmarynski	Master of Science, Mathematics	1.72	2,068
1999	Development of a method for the simultaneous detection of mycotoxins in corn using supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and electrospray-atmospheric pressure ionization/mass spectrometry (ES-API/MS) for extraction, separation, and identification	Jenelle Daria Brown	Master of Science, Preventive Medicine and Environmental Health	1.44	1,791
1956	Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650) : the section on musical instruments	Frederick Baron Crane	Master of Arts, Music	3.14	1,628
1914	Morphology of Cannabis sativa L	Joyce Reed	Master of Science	1.81	1,203
1955	Construction and application of a mechanical differential analyzer	Joseph Emil Kasper	Master of Science, Physics	1.08	1,190
1913	Ore deposits produced by magmatic segregation, with special reference to the nickel ores of the Sudbury district, Ontario	Stuart St.Clair	Master of Science, Geology	1.24	1,113
1937	A study of the origin and development of the educational excursion and field trip	Harriet A. Woods	Master of Arts, Education	1.58	1,113

If you are interested in having your thesis digitized and added to our open access collection, please let us know by submitting this permission form (PDF).