Doctoral Dissertation Guidelines and Procedures
Submit your dissertation for approval after final revisions have been made.
Subject Librarians from the Mardigian Library complete the final check of dissertation formatting once content has been defended and any revisions required by the committee have been made. If any embargo is being requested, the additional embargo forms should also be submitted. Deep Blue requires an ORCID number in order to submit the dissertation.
Please note: the deadline to submit the final electronic copy accompanied by the Dissertation Submission Form is ten business days before the "Last Day to Complete All Requirements" date published on the Registrar's Office site.
To maintain the usability and appearance of your work, please review Best Practices for Producing High Quality PDF Files and Preparing Your Manuscript Guide. Electronic submission ensures the highest quality copy of your manuscript, with color images preserved. The most important consideration when submitting electronically is to be sure that fonts are embedded in the PDF submitted.
Subject Librarians from the Mardigian Library will do a final check for format and notify the student, graduate program director, and committee chair via university email account once approved. This final PDF digital copy will be the copy of record and will be submitted to Deep Blue, a digital repository that is part of the University of Michigan Library. You will be asked to provide bibliographic keywords that describe the content of your dissertation, including subject, concepts, theory, and methods. These will help others to find and retrieve your dissertation.
Deep Blue allows for a maximum of three files no larger than 50 MB each to be uploaded. Students might opt to include supplementary digital materials with their dissertation such as an audio file or spreadsheet or even a software program written as part of the dissertation. Depositing not just the finished work but related materials (data, images, audio and video files, etc.) can create a "director's cut" that gives context to your work and promotes further scholarship.
Doctoral dissertations and abstracts are normally made publicly available upon degree conferral when they are deposited electronically in Deep Blue.
If a doctoral student wishes to postpone public release of the final dissertation, also called a dissertation embargo, the student should discuss embargo options with his or her faculty advisor. It is the student's responsibility to request an embargo of the dissertation.