UWSpace sucks!

[cnst]

For those that are unaware - if you've previously published your thesis at UWSpace (or are about to), don't worry about anyone ever finding it - the University of Waterloo has ensured that no thesis (or even abstract) stored at UWSpace will ever be indexed by competent search engines.

Let me cite their current robots.txt:

User-agent

Comments

[jimparadise]

I enjoy that UofW space can tell that you're a student when you login using your Quest name/password and yet you still have to have a uwaterloo email address to register there.

UWSpace theses are publicly accessible

[anonymous]

A UWSpace technical error occurred that resulted in the indexing failure referred to in the above posting. Thank you, Constantine, for calling this to our attention. The error has been corrected and within a few days search engines will be picking us up again.

UWSpace is an open access repository. The UWSpace team (the Graduate Studies Office and the Library) believes that wide-spread dissemination of UW theses is a significant benefit for authors and researchers.

The theses themselves and the metadata are openly available through OAI-PMH.

I should add that we do have some theses that are restricted for up to a year (in cases of patent or publication pending). But these will gain open access status as soon as possible.

Please contact us with any questions you have.

http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/ETD/team.html

Re: UWSpace theses are publicly accessible

[cnst]

Thank you very much for fixing the problem! I note that robots.txt now looks more reasonable, and I've just received a Google Web Alert with my thesis at UWSpace, so it has now been indexed already.

Best regards,
Constantine.