Development of a Search Webware for Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Stand-Alone Institutional Repositories in Nigeria

Abstract

Postgraduate students in Nigeria universities are faced with the challenge of access to local content literature in the form of theses and dissertations despite the large turnout of these resources. The implementation of standalone Institutional Repositories by individual universities did not reduce this challenge mainly due to low-level awareness, thus the resultant effect is the repetitive cycle of researches conducted at postgraduate level in Nigeria. This paper proposed a single web search system that allows for search and discovery of electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) in the stand-alone repositories of Nigerian universities where they are hosted. Three simulated repositories with electronic theses and dissertations were used as the back-end database in order have a workable model and control over the accessibility of the repositories. Based on keyword search, the web application presents a single interface that displays searched theses and dissertations showing the title, author supervisor and the institutional repository (IR) where the thesis is hosted