How do I find out when my NCSU thesis or dissertation was first made available to the public?

Students often need to establish the date on which their thesis or dissertation became publicly available in order to register a patent for a process or product developed as part of their research.

Theses and dissertations are first released for public access in our digital repository. Upon release, the student should receive an email notification that the thesis/dissertation has been released, and that email includes a link to the individual repository record.

These records include several dates. For example:

https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/resolver/1840.20/36970

The first "Date" that is shown (2019-09-20 in this example) is actually the date of defense, i.e., when the thesis/dissertation was first approved by the student's committee members. However, there is usually a short delay before it is actually published in the repository. At the bottom of the above record, there is a link to "Show full item record" which in this example links to this:

https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/handle/1840.20/36970?show=full

This full record contains several dates, one of which shows the actual date of release to the repository:

dc.date.available     2019-10-02T12:30:48Z

This date is the precise moment at which the thesis/dissertation was made publicly available.

Soon after release to the repository, theses/dissertations are also incorporated into our publicly-available online catalog as well. Our cataloging staff also enables worldwide access to theses and dissertations in the OCLC WorldCat database.

For further information, please contact repository@ncsu.edu.