LRCN urges academic institutions to digitise research results

THE registrar and chief executive officer of  Librarians’ Registration Council of Nigeria, Professor Michael Afolabi, has called on all academic and research institutions in Nigeria to digitise their research outputs and store in their repositories.

Afolabi said this is to ensure the continued availability of the resources and their use by the future generations.

He made this call during the opening of the workshop on ‘Preservation of eResources: Models and Modalities’, organised by the council in Bayero University Kano (BUK), Kano State, on Tuesday.

He said that with the advent of new technologies, digitisation of worthwhile materials should be undertaken at the institutes’ level and efforts should be made to archive as well as preserve the electronic resources for future use.

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He said: “There have been a few global initiatives to ensure preservation of electronic resources.

“There is, therefore, the need for all academic and research institutions in Nigeria to digitise their research outputs and develop a pool of institutional digital repositories across the country.”

He said all information generated within an organisation can be digitised using open source software like Greenstone, Dspace and others.

Afolabi added that the preservation of these resources has become very necessary and as significant as their acquisition, saying libraries have a responsibility to preserve, conserve and restore resources in printed, microform, machine-readable, audio, or video formats.

He further explained that the primary objective of preservation of electronic information resources is the need to prolong the life of non-printed materials.

The registrar said the world is gradually moving towards a paperless society, and that electronic resources have become the most popular tools for research and academic activities.

He noted that millions of users are benefiting from digital information services from the beginning of the 21st century till date.

Afolabi also stated that when research outputs are digitlised and preserved, the resources would still be useful when the publisher ceases to exist or when the content is no longer hosted online, also when a catastrophe prevents restoration of access, and there might be drastic reduction in allocation of funds which limits the library’s ability to acquire new materials.

He, therefore, encouraged Nigerian libraries to develop disaster management plans to guard library materials against natural or man-made disaster.

“Libraries hold sensitive history and important documentation, hence the need for a plan that is not only proactive but preventive so that library resources are not completely lost to emergencies.

“There are documents that are very key to the national life and very important that when such documents are lost or destroyed, it becomes impossible to replace them. Such documents include histories, cultural artifacts, even handover  notes and achievements of political office holders,” he said.

The librarian, Bayero University Kano, Dr Musa Abdul Auyo, while presenting an overview of‘Preservation of eResources: Models and Modalities’, stated that some models have been developed to assist organisations in preserving their electronic resources.

The models include cloud computing; Consortia and Digital Preservation of E-Resources; Metadata and Digital Preservation Systems (DPS).