Implementation and Development of Institutional Digital Repository

Information and Knowledge Management, 2015

Scholars and researchers have increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with the existing model of scholarly communication such as high subscription prices for journals, heightened awareness that universities might lose print materials that are not properly archived and restricted access. These issues have contributed to the quest for alternative modes of preservation and dissemination of information such as institutional repositories (IRs). IRs had been considered one of the emerging initiatives in Nigeria university libraries. The success of IR is dependent on the awareness of and perceived benefits of IR by lecturers. The main purpose of the study is to assess the level of awareness of and perceived benefits of IR among lecturers in federal universities in the South-South zone of Nigeria. The study revealed that lecturers in South-South federal university in Nigeria are aware of IR and its benefits. The study concludes that universities should encourage promotional activities geared towards creating awareness of IR which will in turn enhance positive attitude towards IR establishment in universities. Keywords: Institutional Repositories, Open Access 'online', which would typically mean that they are digital documents available on the Internet. Third, they are scholarly works... Fourth, the authors of these works are not paid for their efforts. Fifth, as most but not all authors of peer-reviewed journal articles are not paid and such works are scholarly, these articles are identified as the primary type of open access material. Sixth, there are an extraordinary number of permitted uses for open access materials; users can copy and distribute open access works without constraint. Seventh, there are two key open access strategies: self-archiving and open access journals (Bailey, 2006:15). Similarly, to the Berlin Declaration (2003) defined open access (OA) is a new mode of scholarly communication through which the author(s) and right holder(s) of scholarly work grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide right of access to, and a permission to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship. According to this definition, a complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission to use should be deposited in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, and long-term Information and Knowledge Management www.iiste.org

This paper explores the historical development, current practices and the challenges affecting the institutional digital repositories in Nigeria; it identifies the various universities that establish digital repositories. The paper further highlight the prospect of Nigerian University Libraries in the implementing institutional digital repositories as it holds great promise for preservation of materials, sharing of resources, and visibility of Nigerian libraries and institutions across the globe. The increase in Nigerian content on the Web will enable more meaningful and fruitful researches to be conducted through access to relevant data and literature. The study discovers finance, copyright issues, epileptic power supply, difficulty in digitizing some materials, technical support and security; constant change of hardware and software are among the challenges facing the digitization project and institutional repositories respectively. The research concludes that digitization of library resources in the 21st Century can revitalized the libraries as information provider.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the availability of various institutional repository policies that guide the development of institutional repositories in university libraries in Nigeria. The study adopted IRs investigation and interview method to collect data on IR policies, challenges from the 19 IRs in Nigeria. The study brought to light some of the IR related policies to guide the implementation and management of contents in institutional repositories. The challenges repository administrators/librarians encountered in the process of developing and implementing IRs in Nigerian universities were also identified. Some of the challenges includes: lack of fund; inadequate facilities; absence of IR related policies; challenge of collecting contents from various contributors; considering copyright issues; lack of mandatory self-archiving policy; lack of interest from contributors to submit to IR. Therefore, the study called for universities intending to establish IR to consider making policy statements related to IRs such as access policy, content policy, submission policy, preservation policy to guide the successful development and management of IRs.

2020

Institutional repository (IR) is the channel through which an academic institution showcases her research power to the world. To this, academic libraries are under obligation to provide access to both print and electronic resources especially those generated within the university in order to increase access to information resources and visibility of their institutions as a measure of prestige and recognition internationally. It is in view of the above that this study on 'the current state and building of institutional repository in the library of Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ikwo, Nigeria' is carried out. The study investigated the state of the IR; the content; the software in use in managing the IR and the digital preservation strategies. The study also identified certain challenges that have hindered the building of the university's IR. Tables, figures and percentages were employed in analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data collected.

2015

The paper highlights the importance and expectation of a global access to information, open access institutional repositories as a requirement for academic and research libraries. The paper further investigated the challenges faced by four African universities in implementing their open access repositories. A literature review method was adopted by way of questionnaire and observation using ProQuest/Serial solutions summons which was a web scale discovery tool that indexes a wide variety of databases. Population of study comprises of four selected African universities;

This paper is an account of the experiences encountered during the establishment and running of the institutional repository (IR) at Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE). A structured content analysis was done to solicit information on the case study of BUSE Library. An online questionnaire was used to gather data on the personal experiences of librarians who were responsible for setting up the IR. It was discovered that there are a number of issues that are involved that include hardware and software, compliance with global standards, content, policy, intellectual property rights, expertise, visibility issues, access and usage. These all contribute to the success or failure of the IR project and should be considered in a holistic manner. The lessons learnt from the project are also included in this study and these include the importance of documenting every stage to ensure that they become points of reference in future. Authors recommend that librarians should commit themselves to the open access movement and there is need to market institutional repositories so that content for uploading is available. This would also help in increasing its usage.

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 2020

Employing Informetric analysis, the study investigated the features, types of documents, subjects spread and challenges affecting the growth and development of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria Institutional Digital Repositories (ABU-IDR). The findings of the study indicated that the IDR has diverse features, deploying DSpace, Dublin core metadata elements and Open Archive Initiative – Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-PMH) to make the repository robust and interoperable. As reported by earlier studies, ABU-IDR is also found to be dominated by theses and dissertations with 9,857(95.82) documents. Finding on subjects spread of theses and dissertations illustrated that Faculties of Sciences and Education have the largest subject coverage with 1979 (20.1%) and 1702 (17.3%) respectively. With diverse features and deploying DSpace, OAI-PMH and its interoperability, the study concluded that ABU-IDR has gained considerable traction in recent years. However, the IDR can be made more effective and efficient by creating institutional repository policy that will take care of copyright, deposition right, diversification of contents and advocacy which are the major challenges hampering the growth and development of the IDR.

2017

The increase awareness of open access, growth in digital asserts, need for accessibility and the quest for global visibility by academic institutions in Nigeria has resulted in the rapid deployment of Institutional Repositories. These Institutional Repositories contains valuable institutional memories such as thesis, dissertations, pre-print and post-print scholarly articles, conferences papers and lots of other institutional memories that need to be preserved for the future generation. Purposive sampling was use to select five institutions that have deployed Institutional Repository with a view to examine the strategies they have in place for the long-term preservation of the contents. The findings of the study revealed that non-of these academic institutions has put in place any strategy to ensure the long-term re-use or accessibilities of the contents of their Institutional Repository. The paper concluded that back-up of Institutional Repository periodically was not adequate enou...

Collection and Curation

Purpose Ghanaian public universities have fully embraced the concept of open access. This is evident in the increasing numbers of institutional repositories (IRs) by universities in Ghana. However, to ensure the sustainability of these IRs, it is vital the current IR infrastructure is capable of responding to current and future demands. The purpose of this study is to investigate the sustainability of the current IR infrastructure of public universities in Ghana. Design/methodology/approach The convergent parallel mixed methods design was adopted. A total of 830 respondents comprising IR managers, library staff (digitisation and e-resources units), postgraduate students, lecturers and university librarians from five public universities in Ghana were sampled for this study. A questionnaire and a semi-structured interview guide were the main instruments used for data collection. Findings The findings of this study revealed that the IR infrastructure of public universities in Ghana is ...

International Journal of Knowledge Management and Practices, 2021

Open access repositories provide free access to institutional outputs that emanate from researchers and scholars within academic institutions. It is an avenue where intellectual content is collected, stored, preserved, and disseminated to the larger audience of the research community. OAR constitutes national, research, institutional, and subject or disciplinary repositories. With the emergence of OAR, scholars and researchers in academic institutions have the opportunity to avail their intellectual output through a repository hosted by their institutions. Academic libraries are also at the forefront in complementing the effort of their parent institutions by collecting, storing, and preserving the intellectual content of the academics, and making it freely available and accessible to the intended users within and outside academic circle. The paper explores the relevance of academic libraries in the promotion of institutional repositories, with particular reference to Nigerian university libraries. Further, it highlights the emergence of open access movement as a blessing to the Android society. Policies regarding OAR are pinpointed. Open source software used in open access repositories are also identified. The role of academic libraries and librarians in the promotion of OAR in Nigerian university libraries is explicitly discussed. Adaption of institutional repositories in Nigerian universities is fraught with numerous challenges, ranging from lack of awareness, misconception, copyright issues, poor Internet services, and unstable power supply to technical know-how. The paper recommends that for the actualisation of adoption of institutional repositories in Nigerian universities there is a dire need for advocacy and awareness campaigns by librarians on the importance of OAR to the academic community. Effective Internet services and epileptic electric power supply should be improved in Nigerian university libraries to achieve greatness for successful adoption of open access repositories.

2020

Ntim whose sacrifices, love and support encouraged me to complete the PhD degree programme. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to the Almighty God for taking me through the programme successfully. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. M. C.

This paper explores the current existing models and technologies used in knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and knowledge dissemination practices in Higher Learning Institutions (HLIs) of Tanzania and proposes the model for the development of an Integrated Digital Academic Repository that enhances management, sharing and dissemination of Scholarly works produced in HLIs of Tanzania. The proposed model is presented and described in the paper. The study was carried out in three HLI using questionnaires, interview, observation and review of literatures. The findings show that, universities produce wide range of intellectual outputs such as research articles, learning materials, theses and technical reports. More than half population involved in the study create and store their intellectual outputs in personal computer hard drives while others store in internet cloud servers and departmental web servers. Moreover, sharing and dissemination of Intellectual output is done through internet i.e. Emails, social network, institution website and cloud servers, journal publication, seminar presentations, posters and printed copies in libraries. The identified methods proven to be unreliable and hindering availability and accessibility of scholarly works. Thus the proposed model provides a central system through which intellectual outputs will be collected, organized and archived and disseminated through it. The paper concludes with the conceptual framework of the proposed system, whereas design and development carried forward to be our future work. https://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/

Institutional repositories are "digital collections that capture and preserve the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community" . While some repositories focus on particular subject domains, an institutional repository stores and makes accessible the educational, research and associated assets of an institution. Although most of the currently established institutional repositories are 'e-prints' repositories providing open access to the research outputs of a university or research institution, the content does not need to be limited to e-prints but could potentially include research data, learning material, image collections and many other different types of content. Institutional repositories are a new but important area within the educational landscape. Through free and unrestricted online availability, they make it easier for researchers to disseminate and share research outputs and thus support the open access goal of scholarly communication. As noted by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), institutional repositories are becoming a major component of the evolving structure of scholarly communication . In addition to authors, who gain visibility, and users, who find information more easily, the potential benefits of institutional repositories extend to institutions, which increase their research profile, and funders, who see wider dissemination of research outputs. This has been recognised by funding bodies worldwide and there is an international trend for funding bodies to require publication of research results through repositories. To maximise the usage and impact of research the eight UK Research Councils, for example, issued a position statement on access to research outputs in June 2005 under the umbrella of Research Councils UK (RCUK). In the position statement (RCUK, 2005) the research councils have proposed to make it mandatory for papers which result from Councilfunded research to be deposited in openly available repositories at the earliest opportunity. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) supports further and higher education in the UK by providing strategic guidance, advice and opportunities in the use of ICT to support teaching, learning, research and administration. JISC is funded by all the UK post-16 and higher education funding councils (). JISC has been playing a leading role in piloting and supporting the development and implementation of institutional repositories to enable the dissemination and sharing of research outputs. For instance, between 2002-5 it funded 14 projects as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme (). These included:

The advent of information and communication technology (ICT), and electronic publishing has opened new avenues for scholars to communicate and disseminate their findings to one another. The objective is to ensure that its benefits reach a majority of the society. The development of Internet technology has also provided academic and research institutions with a very high level of visibility on the web. As a result, teaching, learning and research is widely improved in the global society today.Open access institutional repository has become one of the ICT avenues through which academic and research communities make their research results and findings available to their peers.This paper is a desk study that examines the state of Institutional Digital Repository in Nigeria. General benefits provided by Institutional Digital Repository are given, and also identify Institutional Digital Repository as an option and panacea for Scholarly Communication. Impediments such as insufficient finance, inadequate manpower, lack of power are among the several problems that are brought to the fore of this discussion. Recommendations are also made to address the identified impediments.

This paper reports on the implementation of digitization of resources at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN); the processes involved and the challenges faced. In the context of the establishment of a digital library in University of Nigeria, the study aimed to: establish progress that has been made by UNN in digitizing their resources; report the process of digitizing these materials; find out problems encountered in the digitization project; and proffer solutions to the problems encountered. To elicit the necessary information, a literature review of studies done on digitization was carried out. Additionally, information on digitization of University of Nigeria resources was gathered through the University website as it contained necessary information that guided the study. The research was started off mid 2009 and concluded in December, 2009. Researcher's personal experiences and observation methods were also employed in the course of this study. The paper gives an overview of digitization and the digitization initiative in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka including the processes. A lot of challenges are facing the successful digitization of resources in University of Nigeria. Such major deterrents in the project include legal aspect and finances. Other factors were also discussed and the ways forward to the hindrances highlighted. This paper establishes that there are challenges militating against the digitization project in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) which demands immediate attention. However, solutions are proffered, which can help in ameliorating the challenges raised.