Usability Study Of Higher Education Institutional Repository For Enhancing Institutional Repository Service: Case Study Of Selected Ethiopian Public University Institutional Repositories

Abstract

Institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. Usability of institutional repository is evaluating in which the system is functionally correct, efficient to use, easy to learn and remember, error tolerant, and subjectively pleasing. The number of Institutional Repositories (IRs) has been growing in the past few years. However, most IRs was not widely used by the intended end users. To increase users’ acceptability, evaluating usability of IRs was essential. So, this study was aimed at usability study of higher education institutional repository for improving the institutional repository usability and service. The study was also made operational using cross-sectional survey design with both qualitative and quantitative method. Data was collected using questionnaire and interview from Addis Ababa and Jimma University IR users of 60 postgraduate students and librarians and interview with 4 IR managers who were responsible in the management and maintenance of the IR. The universities and respondents were selected purposefully. The collected data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science version 21 using both descriptive and inferential statistics.The results foundthat no enough thesis uploaded considering all departments, the uploaded thesis were also lacks updating and missing of placements. Postgraduate students’ indicated that institutional repository lacks some advanced search like browse by department, publisher, adviser and publication year. Moreover, from the librarians’ point of view also revealed that the system has complexity user interface. Slow connection, lack of feedback and multiple language support were also identified from students, librarians and IR administrators. Furthermore, the interview was found that the system lacks additional feature user statistics and plagiarism checker. They also describechallenge that affect usability of IR were lack of awareness about IR and lack of information literacy skill. Furthermore, the result obtained from the interview of Addis Ababa University respondents indicated that the Dspace of IR lack integration with Greenstone and Koha softwares. In Jimma University also the IR lacks accessibility via countryside.The finding recommends that library managers and IR administrators should improve the usability of institutional repository in terms of IR collections (upload ETDs on time and organized them in a right way),make to apply the multiple language and feedback support for improving access, should invest time, staff and resources in marketing the repository to users.