The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has announced a N15 billion grant for accelerating work on the National Library as part of its efforts to foster research among students of tertiary institutions.
Speaking lately about the purpose of TETFund’s commitment, Executive Secretary Arc Sonny Echono stated that it was to guarantee knowledge repositories and encourage student research.
He nevertheless attributed the delay in the structure’s completion to some contractual concerns that needed to be handled.
“We are aware that there are some contractual issues, agreeing on the revised estimated cost due to the time it has taken between when the last review was done and current cost of building materials as a result of the exchange rate.”
He claimed that the document was at one point before the Federal Executive Council due to the size of the required approval.
“So, once that is done, the money is waiting and we will disburse it because we believe that a national library is central to our aspirations as a country that is willing to partake in the knowledge economy.”
Echono also bemoaned the prevalence of plagiarism among students, emphasizing that the Fund immediately set out to address the problem in partnership with higher education institutions.
“We agreed that one of the banes of our educational system is the fact that we do not have a national repository of knowledge. When you graduate or you are about to graduate, they give you project topics. You go and do your project. Then, you are required to submit five copies and keep one to yourself.”
“The moment you go, they will park the whole thing in a place; the Head of Department may keep one in the departmental library while another copy would be taken to the central library.
“After some time, you see some of them appear in the market and are used by women to wrap akara because
Echono voiced concern about the thousands of students who submit four copies of their projects to storage facilities each year at schools.
“That contributes to the problems we are talking about. One, we do not have these records. So, students don’t have access to them to learn or to do their research.
“You know there is book review and it is one of the best ways to commence your research work. Secondly, there are no citations for project works because they are not available and are not visible to anybody except those in that particular school.
“The third issue is that of plagiarism. Students can easily copy an entire thesis belonging to another student, change the name and submit same because there is no way of checking for originality since it was done in a different institution.”
Echono stated that in order to solve the issue, a committee had been constituted to offer the appropriate guidance. Based on this advice, the Fund had conducted an evaluation and in-depth consultations.
As a result, it has started digitizing theses in order to build digital repositories. Anti-plagiarism software has also been introduced in all institutions to guarantee the authenticity of theses and projects.
Echono stated that in order to solve the issue, a committee had been constituted to offer the appropriate guidance. Based on this advice, the Fund had conducted an evaluation and in-depth consultations.
As a result, it has started digitizing theses in order to build digital repositories. Anti-plagiarism software has also been introduced in all institutions to guarantee the authenticity of theses and projects.
“We are installing it in all our institutions. We started with our own submissions. Anybody who is making any submissions to TETfund for research grants or for any kind of support, or even submitting report at the end of sponsorship for Master programme or Ph.D, will go through it to see if it is worth it.
“If you want us to publish your book, we will also take it through plagiarism test.
“The previous practice where we used international checkers did not prove useful locally because a lot of our documents are not digitized and as such, they are not even among the system checking.
“You are only checking them with what other people have published around the world, not locally. But now that we are digitizing our own and putting it out there, we are closing the gaps and that is ongoing. The requirement now is to have digital copy of thesis which is what you submit”, Echono concluded.
