Since 2000, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Scotland's national centre of professional vocational training in performance arts, has offered research programmes leading to the awards of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) and Master of Philosophy (MPhil). These postgraduate research degrees are validated and awarded by the University of St Andrews.
The Royal Conservatoire currently doesn't have a mandate for the electronic submission of theses. However, there is a desire to make as much of their thesis content electronically available, where possible. The University's digital repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText, is the ideal place to make that happen. Also, given the nature of the Royal Conservatoire's theses; multimedia, performance-based, and the associated copyright issues that can arise, the St Andrews repository staff are best placed to deal with these, given their experience of copyright issues in theses.
Consequently, in the repository there is now a collection specifically for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's theses, and the first title, hopefully the first of many, has been added:
'Scottish competition bagpipe performance : sound, mode and aesthetics' by Simon McKerrell.
Although the aforementioned copyright issues can be complicated, it is hoped that by working together, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the University of St Andrews will be able to realise their shared goal of making the fruits of research electronically available to all.
