Availability and Utilization of Institutional Repositories as Indicators to Insitutional Web Ranking

Abstract

The ranking web of world universities has attracted a lot of interest in the last two years among Nigerian universities. In response to the very high demand by both library staff and patrons to promote access to the University’s resources, the University of Jos under the leadership of the library launched its open Access Institutional Repository- http://dspace.unijos.edu.ng – in June 2009. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the webometric ranking of the University of Jos. The main objectives of this study are to determine how the adoption of Institutional Repository (IR) at the University of Jos has affected its global visibility and to determine the ratio of research publications as against publications on its Institutional Repository. The data collection instruments used in this survey were both descriptive and exploratory. For the descriptive method, a questionnaire was designed and distributed to academic staff of the University of Jos based on stratified random sample. For the web Analytic method, data collected from University of Jos Institutional Repository statistic interface, along with Web server log files detailing visits to the repository, were processed and analyzed in order to calculate descriptive statistics for the repository. The adoption of IR by staff of the university has had a direct effect on the visibility of the university. IR was introduced to the university in June 2009 with 69 documents and increased rapidly by 81.8% in December, 2009. The university got its first ranking of 4th in Nigeria, 70th in Africa and 7000th in the world in January 2010 based on IR activities for the year ending December 2009. The adoption rate of IR declined to its lowest in December, 2011 to 6.9%. Many reasons have been implicated for this low patronage.