Information Communication Technology Integration and Performance of Libraries in Public Universities in Nairobi City County, Kenya

Abstract

It is difficult to ignore the importance of a library in any university seeing it is one major source of information for students and staff. A research done on challenges faced by public universities libraries users indicated that poor collection development, limited access to information and poor service delivery were major challenges. The user needs have also changed and users are demanding for quick and easy access of information without necessarily going physically to the library. This raises the need for libraries to change the way they provide access to information for their users and improve on their collection as well as service delivery otherwise they may be rendered irrelevant to the users. As an effort to solve these challenges, academic libraries have started integrating Information Communication Technology (ICT) in their operations however, there has not been a well documentation showing the effects of integrating ICT on library performance. This study hence assessed ICT integration and library performance. This study’s specific objectives were to investigate effects of: e-resources; social networks; integrated library software; library networking on library performance. The research was guided by three models namely: Technology Acceptance Model; Resource Based View theory and United Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology Model .The research targeted public university academic libraries within Nairobi City County. Simple random sampling was used to come up with the sample to be used for the study. A total of 74 professional staff from various departments in both libraries constituted the respondents. To come up with the 74 staff, purposeful simple random sampling method was adopted. For data collection questionnaires were adopted. The researcher conducted a pilot study at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) library sampling 10 professional staff of the library. The research design embraced for this study was descriptive research design while descriptive and inferential statistics was adopted for data analysis. It was determined that ICT integration positively influenced how libraries performed and with a significant measure. The study gave a conclusion of E-resources, Social Networks, Information Management Systems and Networking having positively influenced with a significant measure the performance of these libraries. From the study, recommendation for academic libraries to integrate ICT fully in their functionality to achieve higher standards of performance was made. The researcher suggested other researchers can study other factors that affect library performance such as funding and staff satisfaction.