Abstract:
The need for adoption of new information and communications technologies in order to share locally and internationally available information resources has become an important feature in today’s libraries. It is for this reason that this study set to evaluate academic library automation practices at Multimedia University in Kenya. This was guided by specific objectives; to establish the role of continuous teamwork and interuniversity library cooperation on library automation practices, to determine the availability of technology in library automation and to identify the significance of infrastructural, financial and human resources in library automation practices. The researcher employed descriptive research design in undertaking this study. The target population was 2208. The sample comprised of a librarian, 2 assistant librarians, 20% of departmental staff and 10% of library users comprised the sample of 234 respondents. Random sampling was used in selecting the departmental staff. Stratified sampling was used in selecting library users according to their stage of study. Primary data was supplemented by secondary data Results indicated that many university libraries had challenges in ensuring effective automation of their services due to lack of commitment on the part of the involved parties and sufficient resources and insufficient technology and ICT training. The researcher found out that there wassignificant interuniversity library cooperation in terms of inter-library lending and provision of external access. However, there existed incompatibility issues and prohibition by programmers. This demonstrated that although there was sufficient commitment for university library automation, there lacked sufficient ICT training on such technology and that there was only a moderate provision of e-resource facilities. This study concludes that there was a strong positive relationship between interlibrary cooperation and library automation. The study recommends that university library administration should integrate their ICT training arrangements. Secondly, proper mechanisms should be developed to carry out periodic audits of library automation resource allocation. Thirdly, there is need to adopt a common automation technology to solve incompatibility issues. A similar study that can employ longitudinal surveys and case study analysis to corroborate these research findings is suggested as well as research on the suitability of the automation technologies adoption.
