Design of a Digital Archive System for Historical Documents at a Museum in Sokoto State

Physical deterioration of historical documents held by cultural institutions in Sokoto State poses a serious threat to the preservation of North West Nigeria's historical heritage, and the absence of digital archives limits scholarly access. This study presents the design and implementation of a digital archive system for a historical museum in Sokoto State, North West Nigeria. The system was developed using the DSpace open-source digital repository platform, hosted on an Ubuntu server with a MySQL backend. Document digitisation was performed using a high-resolution flatbed scanner, with scanned materials converted to searchable PDFs using Tesseract OCR. Metadata was structured using Dublin Core standards. The archive was populated with 850 historical documents, photographs, and manuscripts from the museum's collection, spanning the Sokoto Caliphate period to post-independence Nigeria. User requirements were collected through discussions with museum curators, historians, and students from Usmanu Danfodiyo University. Full-text search functionality was implemented and tested across 200 targeted queries, with a precision rate of 91 percent and recall rate of 88 percent. The system supports patron-level access for the public and administrative-level access for curators. A three-week user evaluation with 40 researchers demonstrated that the archive reduced document retrieval time from an average of 47 minutes to under 5 minutes. The study recommends phased digitisation of additional collections and network connectivity improvements to enable remote access for researchers.

Keywords: digital archive, historical documents, Sokoto State, DSpace, cultural heritage preservation