Project Details
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ALIMS
Project description
Giving every academic output a durable record and a permanent ID
The Challenge
Nigerian academic work disappears. A final-year project lives on somebody's laptop, a supervisor's confirmation is a signature on paper, and the person who could vouch for it has moved institutions. The work exists, but nothing durable says it does.
Two constraints shaped every decision. It must never claim more than it can prove — an NXR-ID evidences that a record exists, and is explicitly not a DOI, a copyright registration or an ownership determination, so the interface has to say that wherever a reader might assume otherwise. And the whole multi-role workflow has to be walkable by someone with no account, which is why the deployment carries a seeded demo world rather than a sign-up wall.
The Solution
A role-aware application built around the record rather than the page: student researcher, supervisor, department admin, librarian and company each get the surface their job needs, and the same record moves between them by workflow rather than by export. Verification is a state with an owner, not a badge, and the research-lineage view connects records to people, institutions and follow-on work so a contribution is visible in context.
Skills and deliverables
Features delivered
The hard part
Building a product whose central design problem is institutional trust, without inventing authority it does not have. The system has to make verification feel weighty while being explicit that a human decided it — so the interface never renders an automated judgement as a verdict, and there is no "integrity score" to misread.
The Impact
A live system with the complete workflow running: create a record, submit it for review, confirm supervision, complete institutional verification and issue a QR certificate, with preservation, embargoes and disputes handled by the librarian role. Demo accounts for every role are on the sign-in page, so the workflow can be walked end to end in a few minutes rather than described.
