Digital Rights Management in Electronic Publishing Environments: Implication for Academic Libraries in Nigeria

Digital rights management (DRM) involves the protection given to an online document to control what a user can do with the document. The purpose of the study was to analyse the content of institutional repositories (IRs) to identify the extent to which DRM technologies are employed to protect the digitised contents. Four research objectives guided the study. The population of the study consisted of all academic libraries in Nigeria that have IRs that are accessible online. Content analysis was employed to analyse 30 IRs. The findings showed that 13 institutions archived articles, theses, and dissertations while watermarks and digital signatures were the only two DRM technologies employed by a few institutions in the survey area. The implications of this findings are that there is a need to sensitise librarians on the importance of using DRM technologies when uploading their contents to the repository. It is also important to include the use of DRM technology as part of the institutional repository policy.