IMAGINE being able to access the best scholarly articles written in NTU from an information bank and share your ideas with everybody else.
It already exists. The Digital Repository for Nanyang Technological University is an online information bank that aims to capture, store and preserve academic articles written here.
The repository has two services. It replaces the older system, NTUPubs, by letting only NTU students submit their final-year projects, industrial attachment reports and theses and an “open” repository gives faculty and researchers a platform to make their publications available to open access.
The bank makes use of Sig@ir, a tool that helps upload batches of information into the university database and enables data exchange with other library applications.
For example, selected final-year-project reports will be uploaded into the database. Students who are preparing for their projects could access the database through Studentlink and look at what their seniors have worked on before to learn from their experiences.
It also made the university proud by winning the eIndia 2008 award early this month for “Best ICT-enabled University of the year (Digital Learning Category)”.
NTU librarian Ms Joy Wheeler, who handles technology and systems, said they will choose articles recommended by the facult to be deposited in this information bank.
“The recommended reports go through rigorous selection by the OAS (Office of Academic Services),” she said. “Only the crème de la crème will go into the database.”
Jackson Yang, 21, a third-year Materials Engineering student, is hopeful he could use the bank in future.
“After all, as students, we’ve never had a guide—the way to do reports properly,” he said. “We’ve always had to borrow our seniors’ reports. This will change that.”
Associate Professor Goh Hoe Lian Dion, who is involved in the project, is more than happy to input his work into the system.
“Academics and researchers have long had their own web sites to disseminate the results of their work,” said Prof Goh. “An institutional repository can also play this role by giving NTU's faculty a centralised facility to upload their research output for public access.”
