The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has unveiled it’s plan to commence the digitisation of thesis and projects in the nation’s tertiary institutions.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Prof. Suleiman Elias Bogoro disclosed this at a one-day workshop held on Wednesday, December 15, 2021 in Abuja.
TheFact Nigeria gathered that a percentage of the annual library budgetary allocation will be cut to fund the digitisation project.
Bogoro explained that the Fund intends to dematerialise and electronise thesis and projects by starting with the thesis at PhD and masters level across beneficiary institutions with the hope of expanding it to private institutions.
He said the world had gone digital and Nigeria could not continue to operate analogue seeing the numerous benefits the switch offers.
Highlighting some of the benefits, the TETFund Boss said digitising thesis would discourage plagiarism by researchers. He stressed that reproducing and claiming someone else’s work was a criminal act and the offender could lose his/her title as a professor if it was confirmed that they plagiarised.
Futhermore, he explained that dematerialising research work preserves them when unforseen circumstances occur:
“Some number of thesis at post graduate levels and even undergraduate have literarily disappeared.
“Where there are fire incidences, once the physical papers are burnt, the thesis are gone, but if we are able to dematerialise them and they are stored in different forms, at different
repository centers, it is easier to access and protection is guaranteed”, Bogoro said.
He also expressed confidence that upon commencement of the digitisation project, tertiary institutions in the country will score higher ranking in the global rankings.
To drive home his point, the TETFund Boss said:
“These thesis produced by students at undergraduate and post graduate levels forms the primary academic research output of our institutions, and they are recent, produced yearly and in increasing numbers.
“How are these theses stored and/or recovered?
How are they leveraged on to strengthen academic integrity of thesis to be produced in the future?
“With almost a century of research in our institutions of higher learning, where is the academic research output produced in our country today?
What impact has it had on the Nigerian economy?” he asked.
The answer, he replied was the digitisation of thesis.
