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 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.