InRep Scholar: A User-Centred Institutional Repository Model for Rwandan Universities

Universities' Institutional Repositories (IRs) in Rwandan higher education institutions are constrained by technical complexity, costs, and poor user participation, making them ineffective in ensuring access to knowledge. The current study designs and validates InRep Scholar, an IR platform that is simple and based on cloud computing technology to facilitate the management of institutional repositories in settings with limited resources. With a design science research methodology, the platform was evaluated at the African Leadership University. Results reveal significant enhancements in system performance and user participation: successful uploading of documents increased from 80% to 95%, search accuracy with metadata became 90%, the average response time with AI assistance decreased from 3.8 to 2.4 seconds, and user participation improved from 65% to 88%. These findings emphasise the significance of usability and simplicity in repository implementation. Despite the short period of evaluation and its limited scope, the study underscores the viability of low-complexity IRs in developing countries.