By Friday Omosola

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Stakeholders have identified digital archives as panacea to undergraduate projects ending in dust bins and the hands of roadside sellers.

In exclusive interviews with The Hope, the stakeholders stated that digitization has a proven impact on reducing, improving life span, and boosting citizens’ access to university researches.

Speaking with The Hope, Prof. Samuel Agele of the Federal University of Technology, Akure said projects are necessary for higher education students and must be done with utmost seriousness.

According to him, students’ research must provide solutions to societal problems, and they must be accessible through journals in the library.

He noted that there are different methods to embrace in publishing projects, ranging from local, regional and international journals, adding that if projects are in high demand for the end-users, they would be published in journals.

“It can be needed in workshops, seminars among others, but the upkeep of the hard copies of the projects is the responsibility of the university, the faculty, department or the library.

“Projects are documents of high interest, as they are expected to be kept in the library as archived materials and the level of honour to a project depends on the quality of a project which is meant to solve problems.

“If a project is written on a solution to a particular problem, the project tends to be valuable to people who are facing the problem. Several copies and E-copies can be made for a valuable project.”

Also, Mr. Benson Ojedayo, a lecturer at Ekiti State University (EKSU) told The Hope that projects are kept for a maximum of 10 years before they could be disposed of.

The University lecturer said every student’s project should be digitized and made available online via the university library, as done in foreign schools.

He said public institutions in Nigeria must learn from their counterparts in developed nations, where electronic copies of researches are very important.

“The library has a way of archiving books and digitizing students’ projects. This will make them have long life span and also create easy access to them.

Some university students, who spoke with The Hope, expressed displeasure when they see past research works being dumped or used to sell commodities, despite the efforts and resources put into them.

Fatoba Odunayo and Adebayo Toluwalope, said lecturers should adopt use of electronic copies of project works, which can easily be corrected and scrutinized for plagiarism.

They added that seeing project works at dumpsites make students to avoid putting much efforts and resources into their research works, knowing they will end-up in waste-bins.