INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Research and publication have been and will continue to be a critical factor to reckon with in the career life of librarians especially those in the academic environment. It is, of course, a well-recognized verity that the quality and quantity of an institution’s research is one of the yardsticks of measuring its academic accomplishment and excellence. Hence, research productivity of librarians is worthy of focus as the quality and quantity of their publications are a determining factor in their performance evaluations, promotions, tenure, research grants, and salary increment (Okonedo, Popoola, Emmanuel and Bamigboye, 2015).
According to Ogbomo (2010), research productivity is often used interchangeably with publication output, publication productivity. Research output and sometimes knowledge productivity. Research productivity, therefore, is expressed by the entirety of researches conducted by academic librarians in universities in his or her career over a specified time frame. Research productivity of librarians in Nigeria rest largely on the quality, and often the quantity of research published as textbooks, or chapters in books, journal articles, conference/workshop proceedings, occasional papers, monographs, edited books, bibliographies, abstracts, and indexes published. Librarians carry out research and publish for career related rewards such as status enhancement, promotion, securing tenure or permanent appointment; to gain recognition for creative thinking, visibility and acceptability within and outside the university community; to satisfy intellectual curiosity (Ocholla and Onyancha, 2012).
The library has always been known as the heart of academic activities in institutions of learning; it is in this regard that Gbadamosi & Omotayo (1995) describe it as an essential tool in learning at any level of our development right from infancy till death. No institution of higher learning can be successful without a library especially as programmes of study offered within the university would not be accredited without a well-equipped library for the provision of adequate information resources in those areas of discipline.
In providing a conducive atmosphere for research and studies, the university library provides well stocked current research materials and trained personnel to organized available information materials and assist faculty and students in the retrieval and use of these resources. Information retrieval itself has become more complex especially in the face of information overload. As a means of meeting up with the challenges of ensuring that information materials are available and accessible, libraries provide catalogues to display what is available in the library through the circulation department and where they can be obtained.
A large number of libraries in Nigeria have automated their operations and services using this technology to fulfill their user’ needs. Public catalogue, which is an important service of the library, is not exceptional to computer technology. Computerized catalogue is termed Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). It acts as an information retrieval system for the user. OPAC has revolutionized access to bibliographic information through search capacities such as keyword searching, Boolean searching, truncation, proximity searching, and item identity number searching. These were not possible in the tradition catalogue.
Today, a number of libraries are providing OPAC service to their users to find out their documents. In such a situation, the libraries should examine periodically how much comfort the users feel with this service so that some initiatives could be taken timely to improve this facility. In the study, therefore, the productivity of academic librarians will be measured in terms of their research output. Research output includes the number of articles in journal publications, conference/workshop publications, chapters in books, number of books written, compilation of bibliographies, book reviews and on-going researches.
In theory there should be a huge demand for the services OPAC offers. When OPACs were first developed in the 1970s, they were welcomed by library users (Dowlin, 1980). More recent advances have broadened the capabilities of OPAC, increasing their potential to benefit the library user, offering an efficient and self-guided service which does not require heavy reliance upon library staff. Although a handful of experimental systems existed as early as the 1960s, the first large-scale online catalogs were developed at Ohio State University in 1975 and the Dallas Public Library in 1978. These and the other early online catalog systems intended to closely reflect the card catalogs that they were intended to replace. Using a dedicated terminal or telnet client, users could search a handful of pre-coordinate indexes and browse the resulting display in much the same way they had previously navigated the card catalog. Therefore this study examine will examine use of OPAC in service delivery by librarians in university libraries in Edo State.
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century’s grandest information technology accomplishments was the transformation of the library card catalogue into the Online Public Access Catalogue. OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) is an online bibliography of a library collection that is available to the public. Prior to the emergence of OPAC, for users to find information about any item in a library collection, they must flip through or search a collection of catalogue cards in a filing cabinet in circulation using appropriate access points for known items. Where the item is not known, the subject catalogue is used.It is Important to reiterate that the aim of cataloguing materials is to create and organize information, so as to promote access and use of information, and catalogues are often based on the physical location of items in the library. The basic purpose of library automation software is to help in creating a database of library holdings, which will, in turn, provide an online catalogue to help the user in identifying and locating their required documents. However, most libraries in develop countries automated their systems way back in the early and mid-1980s, libraries in Nigeria did not join in the automation movement until recently, even at that, only a few is fully automated.
The measure of academic success in academia is research productivity which requires information resources and this can be obtained through OPAC. The universities and other higher institutions set up libraries to make information resources available to assist academic staff members in their research quest. Therefore, this study set out to investigate to what extent has application of OPAC aided librarians research productivity?
The main objectives of the study is to examine the effect of OPAC application on research productivity of librarians. The specific objectives are to find out:
To achieve the stated objectives, the following research questions are formulated:
The study examines use of OPAC in library service delivery by librarians in university libraries in Edo state. Interestly, only librarians working in universities will be investigated, while other tertiary institutions will be excluded from the study.
It is hoped that the findings from the study will contribute to existing literature on use of OPAC in library service delivery by librariansin library of higher institutions and the finding will stimulate the urge in librarians for furthering their knowledge base.
The findings from this study will also enhance librarians to identify problems militating the application of OPAC in university libraries because increase in the research outputs of academic librarians is likely to ease the tension that is usually associated with researches due to dearth of information materials. The application of OPAC will ease such process and make librarians more productive.
It is hoped that efficient library service delivery could be achieved through the use of OPAC by librarians. Furthermore, more respective colleges in the university could earn accreditation regularly from the National University Commission. The study is equally significant as it would help library authorities to see the effectiveness of meeting users need.
The following terms are defined as used in the context of this study for the purpose of clarity and precision.
Networks: This is a system of interconnected computers for sharing information and resources. This may involve two or more computers in a single office or several computers in different units across an organization or across the country. The networks include the local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN). With computer network, libraries can access and share information in different locations and download for users needs.