Designing A Selective Dissemination Of Information (Sdi) Service For Academic Library: The Case Of Jimma University Library System

Abstract

Library acquires resources from time to time to have a balanced resource within the increment of library users and to have the newest resources as soon as they are published especially in academic libraries. As resources increase, it becomes difficult to users to select important references and information of their interest. Therefore, this study aims to design Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) service that provides information alerting service to keep individuals informed of new resources (books, article, etc) in their particular fields of interest. Design science research method (DSRM) which creates and evaluates IT works proposed to solve recognized organizational problem and the process of inspiring, designing, demonstrating, evaluating, and communicating the artifact was followed. To this end, a prototype SDI system is developed to recommend arrival of new books and journals using python programming language for Jimma University Library System (JULS) users by applying an information filtering approach. Concerned population for this study was 1610 academic staff of Jimma University; out of which 921 considered for sample selection since the rest users have no staff profile on Jimma University website. Hence, Profiles of eighty-six (9.34%) academic staff were registered in user database. Among these eighty-six users, twelfth (12%) of them were used for user acceptance testing. MySQL version 5.5 was used for recording user profile. For testing the prototype SDI system, twenty percent of the data is used and the rest data is used for training. In this work, different matching schemes are experimented; among them, TF*IDF weighting technique with Vector Space Model (VSM) has registered the best performance of 78.76% precision. In addition, the SDI system achieves 95% in user‟s acceptance testing which shows that it has high user‟s acceptance. This further means that, it is advisable to use SDI system to enhance library services. However, the proposed prototype system does not recommend books written in other than English language. Therefore, future research direction is to develop an SDI system that recommends books written in different languages, including local languages.