And the Winner Is . . .

After having been gone on a lovely vacation in Colorado and after having unburied my desk at work, I am now prepared to declare the winner of the Longest Thesis Title Contest:

Congratulations to Eric Benoy from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for submitting the winning entry, weighing in at 289 characters (including spaces and punctuation), a Ph.D. thesis title from 1993:

An investigation of the roles of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, the Louisiana Baptist Convention, and the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in the planting of selected churches and missions in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods of New Orleans, 1950-1991

Look for this contest to reappear next summer when you, too, could have a chance to claim the coveted title, The Person Who Submitted The Longest Thesis Title On That Blog Thing.

(All contestents in this year's program have received honorable mentions and a no-expenses paid trip to Anywhere They Can Afford To Go. All decisions and awards depend on the arbitrary skills of the blogger to paste titles into Microsoft Word and hit <ALT><F> and <I> and are final. This contest is not endorsed by Microsoft® or by Bill Gates, who never wrote a thesis in the first place.)

Longest D.Min. Title Contest

It's that time of the year when we are working on processing the new D.Min. theses. A quick query of our catalog turned up one thesis title from 2001 that was 207 characters long:

Development of an educational program of Christian formation for the Baptist Church of Quintana, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico to deal with the racial and ethnic prejudice in the congregation and the local community

What's the longest thesis title in your library? To be sporting, I'll allow Ph.D. titles as well.

The Turabian Deposit

Remember -- you read about it first here:

I was at a Doctoral Committee meeting this afternoon where we indulged in another round of therapeutic commiseration about the difficulties of proofreading doctoral theses for correct Turabian format. Not only is it a time-consuming process, but there is also the question of who is responsible to do it. It is not unheard of for the duties normally belonging to a document fellow to be lodged somewhere in the library where the librarian must become the angel with the flaming pen to guard the gates of decent punctuation.

Today, though, I was struck with an inspiration: Charge all hopeful doctoral candidates a Turabian Deposit equal to $2 per page of their submitted dissertation. For every page with a formatting error, the dissertation reader gets to keep the $2; for every page without a formatting error, the $2 gets returned to the student. This would serve three purposes:

• It would incite students to exert real effort at proofreading.
• It would help keep dissertations down to a manageable length.
• It would provide some remuneration for what is usually an underpaid privilege.

"But," you say, "what about the dissertations without any formatting errors? Who would pay the reader then?" Somehow, I do not think that will be a serious problem.