Can an unpublished document that was deposited at a library be considered a prior art reference?

In the case of In re Hall, 781 F.2d 897 (Fed. Cir. 1986), the court found that a thesis deposited and cataloged in a university library in Germany has "sufficient accessibility to those interested in the art exercising reasonable diligence" and could therefore qualify as a prior art reference.  However, in the case of In re Croyn, 890 F.2d 1158 (Fed. Cir. 1989), the court held that three undergraduate theses "were not accessible to the public because they had not been either cataloged or indexed in a meaningful way."  These theses could have been located only by sorting through a collection of index cards kept in a shoebox in the university's chemistry department. Taking these cases together, it therefore appears that the answer is: "Yes, as long as the document has been cataloged or indexed and is therefore accessible to the public."

Note, however, that both of these cases are pre-AIA.  It is therefore theoretically possible that the courts will change their posture with the change in statutory language that the AIA brought (plese see my prior post concerning interpretive ambiguities in relation to the clause of 35 U.S.C. 102  "...or otherwise available to the public").