DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A WEB BASED REPOSITORY FOR UNDERGRADUATE PROJECTS

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:

1. To design a web-based repository for undergraduate for SICT, FUT, Minna.
2. To implement the design in (i) using PHP and MySQL.
3. 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.

1.5 Scope and Limitation of Study

This study only takes undergraduate projects of the SICT of Federal University of Technology Minna into regard. A single material (like a project) will contain only the project topic, student name, abstract and the year of project submission.

A user will only be able to search the project catalog for a project either by the project topic, student name, keyword and year of submission.