No fewer than 100,000 e-books are now available to Nigerian universities via the Nigerian Research and Education Network (NgREN).

The Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Julius Okojie, made this disclosure at the formal donation of a four million dollar worth of e-content to Nigerian universities.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that EBSCOHost, a multinational Information Communication Technology (ICT) firm, made the donation on Thursday in Abuja.

According to Okojie, by accessing these resources, Nigerian universities and research institutes will be part of more collaborative efforts that would facilitate accreditation of programmes.

He urged the Nigerian universities to untilise the resources which were made available on the NgREN at no cost until the end of 2016.

“The NgREN has secured access to all EBSCOHost e-books collections and seven EBSCOHost research databases among which is a full text e-journal.

“Others are periodicals and magazines of several academic disciplines and professional specialisations.

“These resources contain more than 100,000 high-quality e-book titles, 27,100 full text journals, 18,430 indexed and abstracted journals, 9,041,400 cited references, daily updates and 630 videos with transcripts and related articles.

“This will in fact, grow the number of available resources in the nation’s university libraries and as a result, heighten research activities among institutions in the Nigerian University System (NUS).

“In addition, it will improve the ranking of Nigerian universities.”

In her remark, EBSCOHost’s Vice-President (Sales), Mrs Collen Mills, said that access to e-content could raise the quality of education.

She expressed her willingness to work with the Nigerian university libraries through the NUC.

According to Mills, by the end of the December deadline, the universities that use the free e-content will see enough reason why they subscribe to EBSCOHost. (NAN)

•Photo shows Prof. Okojie.

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