These resources are great places to start looking for theses and dissertations written in New Zealand and Australia. For theses and dissertations not held at the University of Otago Library, or available open access online, request through Interloan.
The Thesis Information guide contains links to a large number of international thesis sources.
Papers presented at academic conferences can be found in a variety of places. Sometimes they are collected and published in book form or in academic journals - often in supplements. These proceedings may be found through a search of a library catalogue or through many of the databases that you use to locate regular journal literature such as Scopus or Web of Science.
In some databases, you can limit your search to these types of publications. So you could run a search on a general subject area like equality, and limit the publication type to retrieve only conference proceedings. These documents are referred to in different ways, including congresses, meeting papers, and conference proceedings. You can also use keywords such as "proceedings" or "abstracts" to search along with your other search terms.
Remember that often the terms you search with in databases will need to relate to the conference as a whole, rather than to specific abstracts or topics that interest you.
More often than not, conference proceedings will be more difficult to locate than this. Another strategy is to identify the organizations that hold these conferences and check their websites for information on them. Many do make their proceedings and other information from conferences available. For example, the International Sociological Association site provides access to past world congress abstracts.
Researchers may deposit a copy of their conference papers in an institutional respository or make it available on their personal website.
Google Scholar is becoming an invaluable source of information on conference papers and proceedings. Try using the "Advanced Search" option to combine your search terms with words like conference, proceedings, congresses, symposium.
Interloan - If you have a citation for a conference paper, but could not find a copy using any of the methods described above, you can submit a Get It Interloan request for the conference paper and we will try to get you a copy.
A research repository is a place to store intellectual research outputs. A research repository may be an institutional repository for housing the research outputs from a specific institution (like OUR Archive) or a subject repository for housing the research outputs of specific subjects/disciplines (like SSRN).
Try searching these sites to find a variety of publications and research outputs including theses, technical reports, conference papers and working papers.