VSAT: Very Small Aperture Terminal. WLAN: Wireless Local Area Network. 1.9 Assumptions. This study assumed that: 1. Graduate Students will understand the ...
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background of the Study All over the world, it is an indubitable fact that useful research is what thrusts national development. In the information era where knowledge sharing has become paramount, added value is placed on graduate scholarly research. Consequently, the awareness of increasing scholarly research and output beyond the traditional academic environments has become the new order. In any graduate institution, the submission of Theses and Dissertations (TDs) are normally the culmination of a candidate’s research. Graduate scholarly research is meant to communicate new philosophies or build on existing knowledge to academia and governmental organizations. In order to make graduate scholarly research accessible there is the need to re-evaluate the related interest in scholarly communication and publishing; especially, the way to make scholarship cost effective in the limelight of advancing technology. Meeting the challenges of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) era, advancing scholarships should be the ambition of any Higher Education institution. Accordingly, there is a new system for the management and promulgation of graduate TDs. The submissions of TDs electronically are becoming observable fact in most graduate schools all over Europe and the North America. In Africa, fewer graduate institutions in countries such as Egypt, Algeria and the republic of South Africa have instituted the submission of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) (DATAD, 2002). ETDs are new genre of documents, continuously re-defined as technology and student’s knowledge evolve (Fox, 2001f). Mao Ni (2003) opines that “ETDs are
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electronic version of printed TDs. They are getting more and more popular in universities, as ETD systems could save shelve space, more easily searched and retrieved online, and being able to store multimedia data.” ETDs bring to bear a number of merits that countermands TDs. One benefit of ETDs is a reduction in the needless repetition of investigations that are carried out because people are unaware of the findings of other students who have completed a TD (Fox, 2001h). Contents of ETDs are usually indexed and cited in most international online journals hence duplication of effort is eliminated. Content of ETDs are richer and more expressive due to the ability to include multimedia elements such as audio and video files. The inclusion of dynamic constructs such as spreadsheets, interactive forms such as animations is also possible. ETDs help build students’ career. They are published in a timely manner, visible, and easily accessible. Timely publication makes your up-to-the-minute research instantly available (Moxley, 2001). The underlying purposes of ETD activities are to prepare the next generation of scholars to function effectively as knowledge workers in the Information Age (Fox, 2001i), and help improve education in all graduate programs by making recent graduate research results instantly accessible, and launching a large, self-sustaining, digital library of ETDs. In the long term, this should push forward the revolution in electronic scholarly publishing with universities playing a more active and cost-effective role in the communication, production, organization, preservation and dissemination of knowledge; thereby becoming empowered to reduce their expenditures on commercially prepared journals.
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1.2 Statement of the Problem TDs are empirical data produced as a result of scholarly research undertaken by Graduate Students. Since the inception of the Board of Postgraduate Studies in 1974 to 2002, when it was transited to the School of Graduate Studies (SGS), over thousand scholarly researches relevant to academia and the national economy have been produced. It is the vision of the SGS “to ensure the training and development of graduates of higher degree to acquire skills in science and technology. Besides, such graduates are required to provide appropriate research initiative for industry, commerce and other sectors of national economy”; these can be attained if scholarly research produced by Graduate Students are effectively communicated to the public since graduate scholarships are publicly funded. But what do we observe? In the limelight of advancing Institutional Repository (IR) technology, the SGS still accepts bound copies of TDs which get stacked or locked up on library shelves and remain lost “grey” literature to researchers and government sectors who are expected to make use of the outcome of these researches. Moreover, students are not trained as effective knowledge workers in online publishing since they do not go beyond the ordinary word processing skills that lead to paper documents. Hence, Graduate Students end up not understanding processes in online publishing and digital library technology which have become the order of the day. Producing bound copies of TDs and shelving them further exacerbate the problem of accessibility since users have to visit the library physically to gain access. Aside the physical boundaries that limit access, getting round the clock availability to scholarly research is difficult since the library operates within a stipulated time.
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There is also the problem of simultaneous access or use of the resources, thus, only one copy of the submitted TD is kept at the library; therefore, only one person can access a particular thesis at a time. Searching through a large collection of TDs with no classification scheme is tedious. Normally TDs shelved at SGS or main library do not follow standardised classification scheme but they are given numbers based on when it was first submitted. In effect, searching for an exact TD is hindered since all of them are mixed up without any explicit arrangement (example: Subject, Author or Department). Besides, issues of long term preservation and conservation affect the TDs since the paper easily gets mouldy attributable to inauspicious climatic conditions at the library. Principally, as the number of graduate TDs increase there is the propensity of limited shelve space for storage. From the above mentioned setbacks, this research project aims at addressing the issue of storing intellectual output on library shelves by bringing together ideologies of stakeholders who are dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarship; and the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve scholarly quality and public accessibility, and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accepted form. This is accomplished through the design and development of a computer-based learning material on how to convert word processing document to ETD using Adobe Acrobat professional, and a content management system (Digital Repository) to manage the digital assets (ETDs).
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1.3 Hypothesis If the submission of TDs in electronic format is instituted: 1. The design and development of the CBL material will be an effective selfpaced learning material for ETD creation 2. The ETD-CMS will enhance the submission, storage and access of ETDs. 3. Graduate Students who fully participated in the ETD creation process and then self archive their ETDs should understand issues in online publishing.
1.4 Objectives 1. To carry out critical appraisal of the existing processes (policies) and infrastructure for managing TDs, and networking systems within KNUST. 2. To develop a Computer-Based Learning material that will teach how to prepare an ETD with Adobe Acrobat 8.0 professional. 3. To develop an ETD Content Management System (ETD-CMS) that will manage the submission, storage and access of the ETD. 4. To ascertain the efficacy of the Computer-Based Learning Material in teaching and learning, and the digital repository in managing the digital assets (ETDs).
1.5 Delimitation The research is centred on the School of Graduate Studies (SGS), the University Library (UL) and Network Operations Centre (NOC) at the Kwame Nkrumah University Science and Technology (KNUST). The research also focuses on Graduate Students in various departments under the Faculties of Fine Art and Industrial Art (Table 1.1). Submission of ETDs will also cover both abstract and full
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text preservation. The research project does not cover the conversion of retrospective works, explicitly, TDs that have already been submitted in hard copy.
Table 1.1 Departments covered under the Faculties of Fine Art and Industrial Art Faculty of Industrial Art
Faculty of Fine Art
Department of Publishing Studies
Department of General Art Studies
Department of Industrial Art
Department of Communication Design Department of Painting and Sculpture
1.6 Limitations 1. The researcher was not permitted by the authorities at the SGS from taking photographs to substantiate his assertion on the deplorable state of theses at the SGS. 2. Hosting of the ETD-CMS at NOC was virtually impossible; hence the researcher had to reimburse a substantial amount of money to overseas internet service providers to host the system, and also convert a desktop computer as a server for the local testing. 3. Lastly, most of the application software used were trial versions or students’ edition; as a result, certain functionalities such as the drag-and-drop and text recognition capabilities in Adobe Captivate 3.0 were disabled. These prevented the researcher from incorporating these functionalities onto the simulation.
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1.7 Definition of Terms Adobe Integrated Runtime: a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application. Apache HTTP Server: a web server notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web, and in 2009 became the first web server to surpass the 100 million web site milestone. Bandwidth: the amount of information that can be sent through a connection between two computers in a given amount of time. Client: the user of an application. Client-side programming language: a machine-readable artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer. Computer Laboratory: a room with appropriate computer equipments usually networked desktop computers via the internet or local area network. Content Management System: a computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text. Database: Any collection of data organized for storage in a computer memory and designed for easy access by authorized users. Display resolution: the clarity or fineness of detail attained by a monitor or a printer in producing an image. In relation to computer monitors, resolution is defined as the number of pixels per unit of measurement (such as inch or centimeter) on a video display. The word resolution is commonly used to denote the total number of pixels displayed horizontally or vertically on the video display.
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Electronic Book (eBook): it is a fiction or nonfiction text that is distributed and read in digital form, usually on a computer or handheld display device. Front-end/Back-end: generalized terms that refer to the initial and the end stages of a process. The front-end (Graphic User Interface) is responsible for collecting input in various forms from the user and processing it to conform to a specification the back-end (Database) can use. The front-end is a kind of interface between the user and the back-end. Institutional Repository: an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Knowledge Management: a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice. Knowledge Worker:
an individual that is valued for their ability to interpret
information within a specific subject area. They will often advance the overall understanding of that subject through focused analysis, design and/or development. Mobile devices: a pocket-sized computing device, typically having a display screen with touch input or a miniature keyboard. They are also known as handheld devices or handheld computers. MySQL: a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) used in querying, updating, and managing relational databases. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.
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Online Publishing: Publishing information in an electronic form. This includes publishing and making information available through online service. PHP: a scripting language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications. Retrospective Works: Theses or Dissertations that have already been published as hardcopies. Rich Internet Applications (RIA): web applications that have some of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of proprietary web browser plug-ins or independently via virtual machines. Server: a computer that supplies services or data to other machines on a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN) such as the Internet. Simulations: the imitation of some real thing, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system. Stakeholders of ETD: a combination of library, systems (computer department), Graduate School and Graduate Students participation and cooperation to successfully foster, develop, and sustain an ETD project. It also includes persons who have had a role in handling TDs. Web search engine: A tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories.
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1.8 Abbreviations AGORA: Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture CBL: Computer-Based Learning CMS: Content Management Systems DATAD: Database of African Theses and Dissertations ICT: Information and Communication Technology LAN: Local Area Network NDLTD: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor SGML: Standard Generalized Markup Language SPSS: Statistical Provision for Social Sciences VR: Virtual Reality VSAT: Very Small Aperture Terminal WLAN: Wireless Local Area Network
1.9 Assumptions This study assumed that: 1. Graduate Students will understand the processes involved in online publishing and digital library technology 2. It will promote and enhance availability and accessibility of graduate scholarly research.
1.10 Importance of the study 1. The project will be used as a reference material for academia and other researchers for further studies.
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2. It will also serve as a means of managing and promulgating scholarly research produce at KNUST and other graduate institutions in Ghana which adopts this system. 3. The research project will be used as a teaching and learning podium for graduate institutions which are embracing the ETD initiative; and those which have but find it difficult to teach the aspect of developing the eresources (eBooks) due to their busy schedules. 4. The research project will also serve as a principal guideline for third world countries that have realised the need to initiate ETD submission.
1.11 Arrangement of the rest of text The research project comprises eight chapters including chapter one. The Chapter Two of this research project deals with the review of literature relevant to the study. Chapter Three deals with the various methodologies employed for the design and development, and analysis of data. Chapter Four examines the existing processes, policies and infrastructure for managing TDs, and networking systems within KNUST. Chapter Five focuses on the design and development of the computer-based learning material. Chapter Six examines the design and development of the content management system. Chapter Seven critically analyzes the responses gathered from the questionnaire administered and interviews organized. Finally, chapter Eight concludes the entire chapters with the summary, conclusion and recommendations.
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