an information resource system for east african school of library and information science undergraduate research reports of 2016/17

Description

The project purpose was to design and develop an Information Resource System to manage EASLIS undergraduate research reports. The project objectives were to: Examine the current manual system used to manage EASLIS URRs, Determine the challenges associated with the current manual system used in the management of EASLIS URRs, Determine the system requirements necessary to develop an Information Resource System and Design an Information Resource System for EASLIS in order to manage URRs. A case study approach of the qualitative research design was adopted to collect data. A sample size of 44 respondents was targeted however only 35 respondents fully participated in the study. The sampling method used to select samples was the purposive non-probability sampling method whereas Interview, questionnaire, observation, and document review methods were used for data collection. The findings revealed that: referencing to URRs was the most dominant mode of access to the URRs managed at EASLIS, users of the manual system basically faced challenges of difficulty in to access to reports and lack of statistics to reports managed at the school faced the manual system, the requirements for the proposed IRS were ability to access, store, preserve and generate statistics on reports managed at the school and expected user benefits of the proposed system were ability to access, share and search for URRs. The study concluded that: the manual IRS allows Referencing to URRs as a mode of access to URRs at EASLIS, the challenges of the manual system were the inability to generate statistics and difficulty in accessing URRs by students, the user requirements of the new proposed system were functional and non functional to the system and the proposed system has a wide range of benefits to both students and administrative staff at the school in regards to managing URRs. The study recommended that: the newly designed and developed EASLIS IRS should be adopted to manage URRs at the school, access to URRs with the current manual system would be improved by replacing it with a new automated IRS, extensive use of IRS could be improved by incorporating the new system with provisions to access, share generate statistics on the reports managed at the school and users of the proposed IRS should be educated and oriented on how to interact with the new IRS.