Just a heads up …
OCLC has announced it will stop supporting Dissertation Abstracts (among others that do not affect us) on First Search as of February 28, 2011. CUNY is working on some alternatives but at this point it nothing is certain so there might a time where we do not have access to any dissertation information.
As possible alternatives, the Graduate Center and John Jay subscribe to the full-text Dissertation abstracts. It will still be possible to Inter-library Loan dissertations.