Institutional Digital Repositories in Nigerian: Issues and Challenges

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. 1991 the e-print service arXiv was developed by Los Alamos physicist Paul Ginsparg. It eventually led to the Open Archive Initiative in which it enables institutional repositories to operate together. In 2001 Eprints was developed, while 2002 Dspace and HP and in that same year FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) was developed. This software is used as platform to deploy IRs. They are the programmes that provide structured data-entry points for digital resources leading to semantic relationships. Semantic relationships are further enhanced by the introduction of metadata, i.e. data about data, which increases the direct findability of resources, rather than mere accessibility. Find ability of resources is used to denote the aggregation of relevant materials in their order of importance, with synonyms, and with options for different media or format, such as texts, sound, motion, graphics, or any combinations of these