Perspectives on university library automation and national development in Uganda

Abstract

Academic libraries in universities store large volumes of research that can be used for development purposes to support teaching, learning, research, innovation, community outreach and partnerships. Library automation incorporates the adoption of integrated library systems. Effective adoption of an integrated library system enables broad-based access to global and local knowledge sources to solve local, regional and national development challenges. Using a sequential mixed methods approach in a case study of a Ugandan public university, Kyambogo University, this study investigated the perceptions of librarians, information workers and other university stakeholders with respect to library automation and the contribution thereof to national development. The results confirmed that the integrated library system improved library operations and played an important role in supporting national development. This study also highlights the continued challenges of adopting an integrated library system in developing countries such as Uganda, which, if addressed, could further improve information service delivery for a nation’s socio-economic transformation.

Diffusion of open source integrated library systems in academic libraries in Africa

“…Subsequently, many academic libraries in Uganda have embarked on automation projects with varying degrees of success (see e.g. Buwule and Ponelis (2017) for a case study of Kyambogo University and Jibia et al (2013) for a case study of Cavendish University Uganda).…”

“…Several studies of OS ILS implementations at particular institutions are reported in the literature including, in Kenya (Adera Amollo, 2013), Nigeria (Egunjobi and Awoyemi, 2012;Omeluzor et al, 2012;Uzomba et al, 2015) and Uganda (Buwule and Ponelis, 2017;Greenberg and Versluis, 2005). Country-level studies, such as the study of ILS adoption in South Africa (Stilwell and Hoskins, 2012), are comparatively fewer.…”

Harnessing digital power for relevance: status of digital transformation in selected university libraries in Uganda

“…Barriers hindering digital transformation in university libraries in Uganda Most participating librarians indicated that inadequate funding hindered digital transformation in their libraries, which suggested that the surveyed university libraries in Uganda were not adequately funded. The issue of limited funding in university libraries has also been reported in several previous studies, which indicated that lack of funding hindered the implementation of IRs (Buwule and Mutula, 2019;Dlamini and Snyman, 2017;Kodua-Ntim and Fombad, 2020;Owusu-Ansah, 2020), ILMS (Aregbesola et al, 2019;Buwule and Ponelis, 2017;Komolafe-Opadeji and Ojo, 2019), IoT (W ojcik, 2016) and 4IR technologies (Acheampong and Dei, 2020). The ongoing financial difficulties faced by libraries have hampered their ability to acquire technological and information resources (Jain and Akakandelwa, 2016).…”

“…Librarians lacked the knowledge of which technology to implement in their libraries; otherwise, how can they implement something they did not know exists? Furthermore, other studies reported a lack of awareness hindered the implementation of digital transformation technologies such as RDM (Cox, 2019; Tang and Hu, 2019), LMS (Aregbesola et al , 2019; Buwule and Ponelis, 2017; Olatunji et al , 2020) and cloud computing (Meher and Maharana, 2015).…”

“…For example, Al-Awadhi and Al-Daihani (2019) reported that management support was critical in the adoption of social media. However, the absence of managerial support was cited as a challenge hindering Nigerian university libraries from deploying robots (Odeyemi, 2019) and the implementation of LMS (Buwule and Ponelis, 2017; Olatunji et al , 2020). These and more are some of the facilitators and barriers affecting digital transformation within university libraries as indicated in the literature.…”