This news was culled from The Nigerian Tribune’s publication of May 26, 2022
THE Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Arc. Sonny Echono, has inaugurated the fund’s Thesis Digitisation Project Steering and Coordinating committee.
Echono who inaugurated the Committee in Abuja, said the project was necessitated by the need for a National Academic Research Repository (NARR) given that numerous research outputs were gathering dust in libraries across tertiary institutions in the country.
While saying the few existing repositories in the country are not available to national or global audiences, Echono said such development prompted the intervention of TETFund’s Board of Trustees (BOT).
“The Board of Trustees of TETFund, in a bid to redress the situation, initiated the ‘Digitization of Thesis Project,’ tasking the Executive Secretary with shepherding a centralised mechanism that will form the basis for storing dematerialised academic output in electronic form, federated across all beneficiary institutions of the Fund.
“Following this mandate, the management approved a consultancy, which conducted various interactive sessions and surveys over a period of nine months to identify how academic output in the form of thesis and other digital resources produced by undergraduate and postgraduate students are stored, handled, and utilised.
“Part of the report submitted showed through comparative analysis of practices and approaches that our beneficiary institutions lag significantly in two key areas – There is a lack of properly structured digitised theses available for integration into global digital repositories and the absence of a National Academic Research Repository or a coordinated collection of institutional repositories.
“Undoubtedly, some of our beneficiaries have made significant progress in their efforts to digitise academic output. But sadly, the vast majority of beneficiaries – about 80 per cent, have not even started or had any significant results to show for their efforts, whilst about 10 per cent have digitised a considerable volume of their thesis,” Echono said.
The TETFund boss said the digitisation project would also address issues such as plagiarism, intellectual property, commercialisation of academic works, among others, adding that the scheme would begin in 100 institutions with a target of dematerialising up to two billion pages of research materials.
Echono listed the terms of reference of the committee to include: development and adoption of a Model Digitisation Policy for the beneficiary institutions; provision of coordinating support and guidance for the project management team in order to implement the digitisation project successfully, development of frameworks and procedures to ensure that the project deliverables are strictly adhered to, among others.
Responding, the chairman of the committee and secretary-general of Committee of Vice Chancellors of Nigerian Universities, Professor Yakubu Ochefu, pledged the readiness of his team to deliver on the task.
Ochefu, who commended TETFund for initiating the project, said the scheme would turn around the fortunes of the nation’s education system.
Earlier in a goodwill message, the executive secretary of National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), Professor Idris Bugaje, described the project as a game changer, adding that it would not only end plagiarism in research work, but would ensure easy access to information and networking by scholars.
He called on scholars to leverage on the digital platform to transform their research works to real Nigerian technology.
