CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
Storage facilities may hold aggregations of learning things as a circulation focus may store books, or they could hold collections of information about learning articles as a library record may hold portrayals about books. Storage facilities offer parts to bolster the disclosure, exchange and re-usage of learning articles (Richards, McGreal and Friesen, 2002).
The School of Information and Communication Technology (SICT) repository, Federal University of Technology (FUT) Minna is an online application with a user friendly interface that will provide access for a user to easily lay hands on all the undergraduate projects written by graduates of SICT. The information provided about a project is majorly the project abstract and a hand full of other relevant pieces of information such as the student name, the year of project submission (the year the project was written) and the project topic.
This repository will provide a user the ability to browse the project catalog and search through by the student name, project topic or year of project submission. Hence, this will help potential graduates of the faculty (SICT) to know the topics that research has been carried out on, the area of concentration of the research done and the extent to which the researcher stopped.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
Projects already submitted to the SICT cannot be accessed anywhere and at anytime without having to come to the school building and reaching the office in charge. In case of fire incidence or water, the copies of the projects curated by the school could be damaged or totally lost. Searching of projects is very hectic and slow due to the quantity of projects and limited human effort. Also, access to projects can be delayed due to the official procedures and protocols involved in the process.
Therefore, this work is to develop a repository to solve this problem.
1.3 Aim–and–Objectives–of–the–Study
The purpose of this study is to develop a web-based repository for undergraduate projects of SICT, FUT Minna. This will be achieved by the following objectives:
- To design a web-based repository for undergraduate for SICT, FUT, Minna.
- To implement the design in (i) using PHP and MySQL.
- To evaluate the proposed system in (i).
1.4 Significance of the Study
A key function of this research is that the SICT repository provides a unique storage identifier for every object, therefore making it feasible with the aid of the search module incorporation into the web-based repository application to efficiently search, discover and retrieve objects (projects) from its database. Both staff and student will benefit from this feature in that one can easily search for a project by the project name, student name or year. The office in charge of keeping and handling undergraduate projects will now have better support for storage of graduates’ projects and easy retrieval on request.
The SICT repository could also serve as an educational environment for many internet users and researchers. It will encourage researchers to take up further research on a subject matter (like a project) and thereby add to the body of knowledge. This repository also covers authors of the projects and because it clearly attributes the student name (author) to its content.
