Institutional Digital Repositories in Nigerian: Issues and Challenges

Institutional Digital Repositories in Nigerian: Issues and Challenges.

ABSTRACT 

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 highlights the prospect of Nigerian University Libraries in implementing institutional digital repositories as it holds great promise for the 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; the 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 revitalize the libraries as an information provider.

INTRODUCTION  

Libraries were among the early users of information technologies to manage their operations as per back as 1930s and have continued to adapt albeit slowly to changing technological environment characterized by emerging new technologies and applications and issues of globalization.

More than ever before, libraries are facing tremendous challenges in meeting the evolving and sophisticated needs of a diversity of users.

Increasingly, the global environment characterized by concerns about globalizations issues such as, digital divide, information society, and attainment of millennium development goals necessitate participation of libraries as key information providers to collaborate with governments,

development agencies, NGOs, academia, and private sector to address these issues. In the 21st Century, universities libraries in Nigeria have embarked on integration of technology in their operations.

This serves as a mechanism for improvement and development, especially, in a situation where attention is drawn to the academic contents and ways of digitizing and preserving them for future use. Libraries have long played an essential role in containing, preserving, and sharing of information.

Many information technologies have been created over the years; to cater for the entire library operations, particularly information storage and retrieval.

University libraries are fully involved in this development as they are the heart of the University, being that they house the intellectual resources of the institutions. The effort to digitize the intellectual property of the institution is what is known as digitization (Eke, 2011).

Part of the emerging role of academic libraries is the implementation of institutional repositories (IRs), digital collections that capture and preserve the intellectual output of university communities (Crow, 2002).

According to eHow Institutional Repository started with the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW). In 1991 the e-print service arXiv was developed by Los Alamos physicist Paul Ginsparg. It eventually led to the Open Archive Initiative in which enables institutional repositories to operate together.

In 2001 Eprints was developed, while in 2002 Dspace and HP and in that same year FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) was developed. This software is used as a platform to deploy IRs. 

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CSN Team.

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