An assessment of the effectiveness of the academic library online public access catalogue (OPAC) by students: a case of University of Venda Library

Abstract

1 online resource (ix, 65 leaves): illustrations

Academic libraries share a common mandate of supporting the core business of their parent institutions which is teaching, learning and research. There is again a common mandatory understanding that the evolution of Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) should be in line with the evolution of technology and its services to maintain its effectiveness in academic libraries. Therefore OPAC should be a complex matrix for users, for users to be more effective it is important that for OPAC to be more effective it should encompass the current trends and features of advancement to meet the current user's expectations. The study was based on the Assessment of the effectiveness of the academic library Online Public Access (OPAC) by students to fulfill its mandate of supporting the core business of their mother institutions like teaching, learning and research.

This can only be possible through OPAC training to new students during library Orientation programmers to teach them effective strategies to access locate and retrieve library collection, also taking into consideration the changing of user behaviour and preferences about OPAC interface features as compared to the internet Google search engines.

Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used in this study and for data analysis, Statistical Package for Social Science for cross-sectional analysis (SPSS) and inductive interpretation was used. The findings will help University of Venda managers, OPAC interface developers and the library team to explore new ways of making the OPAC interface to more effective and stay relevant to its users.

At the end of the study the researcher recommended the revisiting of the current OPAC interface for the total changing of OPAC interface to be at the level of its competitor the Internet Google search engines which students likes the most whenever the need information in the library.