I am thinking of creating a website after my thesis is over in a few months as a kind of "archive" of my thesis project... a description, copies of my papers, and the thesis, etc. It is a humanities PhD, I don't expect to get an academic job, so it might be a nice way of saying goodbye and making sense of it all. Plus future researchers and general interested persons will fall upon it when they google search. Does anybody have either experience of these or have they seen good ones? I would get help with the design to make sure it is a suitable memorial! ,)

I'm typing "thesis website" etc etc into google and not getting anything I want....

I don't have any experience of this, but my one concern is that if you did want an academic job in future, and turn your thesis into a book or papers (as many new post-docs do), it might be harder to do this if you've put them freely available on a website.

Then again it sounds like a nice idea. I have a personal website myself and when I finish (all going well) it might be nice to add a description of my research there (humanities as well), plus details of papers etc. But personally I wouldn't put downloadable material that is either under copyright already (journal papers), or I might conceivably want to do something with in the future (full thesis). Ditto for not putting online the large databases I've been building, but I could put descriptions of them up.

Yes, those are good points about saving things in case an academic career does work out. And I hadn't thought about the journal articles being a problem, when of course they are since they are printed in journal. Hmmm, best to stick to descriptions and then cite the papers things are in. I wouldn't want to but the thesis online and then do nothing with it only to discover that somebody's monograph in 5 years looks awfully similar!! Perhaps if I pass and turn it into a book then a description of that.

Hmmm, whacking the thesis online does seem tricky

Ask permission of your supervisor in case they're want parts of it published in journals.

Blogging your thesis is something johnhawks.net advocates -- he's a cool paleosomethingorotherologist.

usually the uni has ownership of all the work u do, the whole intellectual property thing, so they might not take too kindly to you putting things in such an accessible format, while it's a great idea maybe check with ur uni first!

I've just had all the forms relating to access to my completed thesis. One of the options is to make the thesis available online in digitised form via both the British Library and my own institutional repository, in addition to the bound copies in the BL and my own uni library. I'm thinking of opting out of making mine available online to anyone right now, though will investigate further. This current obsession with making everything open access online seems to be in its early stages at the moment, at least at my uni, and I'm not convinced of the IPR protection it offers me as I want the whole thing to be published almost as it is as a book and I'm worried about the copyright implications for the publishing contract. This is England though, it might be different elsewhere.

You might find your own university offers an online access option for completed PhDs and you can just link to that from your own website if you have one. It would look more authoritative if it was hosted by a university digitised library.

I dont think the univerisity would approve because as someone said below about the whole intellectual property stuff. When you submit your thesis you sign a declaration, and your supervisor might want you to publish papers. Also if you've already published papers from the thesis I would say the publishers might not approve either.

Thanks for your comments. I guess I have been naive about property rights issues. I will proceed with just a truncated description of the thesis and a list of where interested parties can lookup the papers in X or Y journal etc...