Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
Summer 12-6-2022
Abstract
The academic communities have undoubtedly been struggling for some years now with difficulties in disseminating and communicating research findings. This is as a result of the ever increasing high cost of journals, which are the traditional medium for research communication and how this as affected libraries budget, most especially in the depressed economy of developing countries. The financial difficulties being experienced by academic publishers have also added to this pain. Many academics have their research work stored in Microsoft (MS) words and other digital formats on their computers, but only very few of them ponder on the long term preservation of these materials for the use of coming generations of scholars. Also most of the unpublished students research theses and dissertations are obscurely stored in libraries and other rooms. This paper gives an overview of Institutional Repositories (IRs) in Nigerian university system. It highlights the advantages of IRs to the universities, the academic staff and the scholars such as opening up research output of universities to a worldwide audience, boosting universities ranking and prestige, increasing the visibility and citation impact of universities scholarships, preserving the universities scholarships and the potential of bridging the education and digital gap between the advanced countries and the developing nations. The paper identifies some of the issues that adversely militate against the development of IRs in the Nigerian university setting as lack of awareness of open access IRs, inadequate information and communication technological infrastructure, inadequate advocacy for open access initiative, copyright issue, low preparedness of academic librarians to acquire and apply digital knowledge, non-existence of institutional repository policy, narrow technological expertise, non- enough funding, problem of inadequate ICT infrastructure and insufficient internet bandwidth and inadequate poor erratic electricity power supply. Lastly the authors proffer suggestions for University Librarians, University managements and policy makers for developing viable IRs in Nigerian universities. The paper is not based on any prescribed methodology but the authors’ reflection constructed on extensive literature review of extant related studies on IRs in Nigeria supported with online assessment of Nigerian Institutional Repository niceties from Open DOAR. (https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar)