This looks like a great concept; we’ll have to see how valuable it really is. A lot of scholarly material is locked up in the UMI ProQuest databases and I doubt that Google will be able to gain access to much more than the abstracts of these papers, if even that. I found one of my papers cited a few times, including two Spanish language entries. Interesting!
I chose not to submit my MA thesis to UMI. Something about me paying them to include it so they could turn around and sell copies of it bothered me. I posted it in Ulukau, our online Hawaiian digital library, instead. For free. In .pdf or text, with music transcriptions, with audio samples of all the examples cited in my paper; something that you can’t do in a book.
