Deployment And Usability Evaluation Of Mobile Access To Institutional Repository

ABSTRACT

An Institutional Repository is essentially a web application that is capable of capturing, preserving and disseminating the intellectual output of a University or research institution in digital formats. The advent of the Mobile Web has ushered in a new wave of mobile devices - with multi-touch facilities and thus there has been a shift from Web access to Mobile Web access. This has brought about the need to make web applications accessible via mobile devices. This study investigated the usability of the core functionalities of an Institutional Repository on various mobile devices. The work did not try to create a mobile version of the repository but rather test the existing web application on various mobile platforms. To achieve this, the core functionalities of the repository were modelled using Unified Modelling Language (UML). In addition, an Institutional Repository was built and deployed for Covenant University by leveraging on open source repository software – EPrints. Furthermore, the core functionalities of the Institutional Repository were tested on five different mobile devices. Finally, the usability of the Institutional Repository on the various mobile devices used was evaluated by identifying the usability attributes; designing a questionnaire based on those attributes and then analyzing the results with SPSS software. The results showed that overall the current web version of the repository had a good usability score on the mobile devices used.