Evaluation of Factors Influencing the Acceptance of Koha Library Software in Selected Academic Libraries in Uganda.

ABSTRACT

The study aimed at evaluating the factors that influence the acceptance of Koha library software in academic libraries. The specific objectives included; (1) to determine the socio-demographic characteristics of respondents in terms of age, gender, highest level of education and number of years worked with the library; (2) to investigate how system productivity influences the acceptance of Koha library software in academic libraries; (3) to determines how ease of use influences the acceptance of Koha library software in academic libraries; (4) to ascertain how peer pressure influences the acceptance of Koha library software in academic libraries; (5) to identify how existence of resources influence the acceptance of Koha library software in academic libraries; (6) to establish whether there is a relationship between system productivity, ease of use, peer pressure and existence of resources and acceptance of Koha. Research devised self administered questionnaires which were constructed guided by prior research questionnaires prepared by Anderson and Schwager, Dye, Jaha and Ab.Rahim (2012) and Venkatesh, Thong and Xu 2012.) were used to collect data from a sample of 103 and 50 interviews were carried out from respondents who were purposively selected from International Health Sciences University, Uganda Christian University, Uganda Management Institute and Nkumba University libraries. Descriptive data analysis in terms of frequencies, percentages and means was carried out to analyze the demographic characteristics of respondents and to establish how factors influence Koha acceptance. Correlational data analysis using Pearson Product Moment Correlation was also carried out to establish the relationship between the factors; system productivity, ease of use, peer pressure and existence of resources and acceptance of Koha. The descriptive data analysis results indicated that most of the respondents were male with a percentage of 56.8%, majority of the respondents in the study were in the age category of 25- 29 years 39.5%, libraries are dominated by Bachelors of library and information science holders with a percentage of 49.4%, majority of the respondents have worked with the libraries between 1-3 years and have a percentage of 44.4%. Most of the respondents rated productivity highly with a mean of 4.20 and the least ranked factor was Peer pressure with a mean of 3.12. Koha acceptance was observed in the four academic libraries where research was carried out. They are using almost all the modules to carry out library operations. Respondents ranked using the cataloguing module to catalogue information materials highly with a mean of 4.46 and using the acquisition module to make orders from vendors, budgets and get pricing information was ranked least with 1.07. Correlational data analysis indicates that the H01, H02 and H04 were rejected with their levels of significance being 0.05 and below except H03 whose hypothesis was accepted. H03 was rejected because critical value was above the level of significance of 0.05. On the overall, factors and acceptance of Koha are significantly related with Sign. =0.000). Regression analysis was used to measure the strength of the relationship and results showed that factors significantly influence the acceptance of Koha with R=.632, P=.439 F=12.641, Sign=0.000 and the adjusted R square of .638. The factors influence the variations in acceptance of Koha by 63%. The remaining 37% is contributed by other factors among which include anxiety, domain knowledge and computer literacy.