DEVELOPMENT AND USABILITY EVALUATION OF A WEB SEARCH APPLICATION FOR ELECTRONIC THESES AND DISSERTATIONS IN REPOSITORIES OF NIGERIAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Abstract

The research process that results in the production of theses and dissertations involves a detailed literature review to support areas of the research study which means search and retrieval of information related to their research must be done to reduce or avoid as much as possible the issue of repetitive research and plagiarism. Despite the large turnout of these research outputs, postgraduate students face two critical challenges in the course of their research studies. Firstly, there are repetitive researches because of the oblivion of researches conducted in other universities. Secondly, there is the issue of access to local content literature in the form of theses and dissertations to build up investigations. To address these challenges, this research study developed and evaluated a web search application for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in federal university libraries in Nigeria to solve the challenge of poor global visibility of electronic theses and dissertations from Nigeria. The study adopted an action research design and used mixed research methodology to achieve the objectives. Four research questions and six hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance guided the study. Seventy respondents comprising ten (10) institutional repository administrators and sixty 2018/2019 postgraduate students provided the data for the study. Three sets of data collection instruments (two questionnaires, one interview guide and one observation guide) were administered to the respondents. Triangulation was used to collect data about the management of ETDS in institutional repositories based on policies, contents and system architecture. A task oriented approach was used to collect data from the institutional repository administrators for the assessment objective and postgraduate students for the usability study Data collected was analysed descriptively and inferentially using frequency counts, chart, median and Kruskal-Wallis analysis of variance. Findings from the study revealed that the management of electronic theses and dissertations in Nigerian institutional repositories was poor based on policies, contents and system architecture. Only half of the institution studied had polices for their repositories. In institutions where policies were available, the management of ETDs was poorly and not explicitly stated. Electronic Theses and Dissertations content in the repositories were in portable document format (PDF) and had no copyright measures. The ETD contents in the repositories were also stored in institutional servers and were not registered on the Open Archive Initiative- Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI- PMH) framework. There were few policies and the major challenges identified with the management of these resources in the repositories were content population, funding and inadequately skilled staff. The ETD search application was designed using PHP, WAMP and MySQL. The six hypotheses tested revealed that there was no significant difference in the opinion of postgraduate students on the usability effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the application based on information and transactional queries. The study recommended an ETD policy framework, a content populating workflow and a funding framework for the effective management of ETDs in institutional repositories.