CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The ever evolving Internet platform and technological advancements in the area of information management offers innovative ways to information managers to use in the acquisition, storage, management and dissemination process of information. To this end, university libraries are always on the lookout to adopting the new tools to improve their services to the users. Digital repositories are the new platform that libraries are adopting as an additional digital resources and services on their portals. This requires additional investments and increase in resources towards the full creation and implementation of the institutional repositories.
Institutional repositories also known as digital libraries serve to provide services that support users in their tasks and they involve interacting with the systems and interaction behavior. The components of import in the scenario of such services include users, the presented content as well as the system on which they are performed.
The latest innovations for academic institutions and resources centers in the area of information are the digital information resources. Digital Information resources have been defined by Bhattacharya, U. (2007) as information bearing material in digital form and it includes databases both local and remote, CDs and DVDs, and electronic publications that include e-journals, e-books and the Web resources.
Many academic institutions worldwide have adopted e-resources as important infrastructures in improved service provision for their users. Included and of special focus in this study are digital libraries or repositories defined as “organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities”, Digital Library Federation (1999).
In the same manner that Libraries became hallmarks of a university, Digital repositories are stamping their existence in many academic and research institutions. It seem that it is a ‘must have’ in universities and research institutions. In a survey of 1152 respondents in the information world about digital repositories, 70% had established and implemented digital repositories while 22 indicated their intention to implement.
It is then a reality that digital repositories can only increase in number in as many felt that the importance of repositories was on the increase. In Africa, digital repositories will certainly increase in the universities as they are tied to webometric ranking that help increase the research visibility of African universities.
“KUBANNI” the repository of the Ahmadu Bello University runs on DSpace (2), an open access proprietary software that is not only useful for archiving and disseminating research-related documents but offers excellent utility features such as reuse, metadata storage that are in tandem with requirements for modern repository usage.
Wherefore, traditional studies focused on assessing the value of information technology to the organization and the determinants of that value with the objective of helping firms to “better deploy and manage their IT resources and enhance overall effectiveness”, Several approaches have been used to address this problem. Of interest to this study is the approach to examine the determinants of IT adoption usage by individual users as advanced by Davies, (1989) and Davies et al, (1989). The forerunners of this thinking were Delone and Mclean (1992) who focused on the examination of usage as a surrogate measure for information systems success.