A current awarness system for the National Library of Uganda.

Abstract

The study aimed at developing an electronic current awareness system for National Library of Uganda. The study was conducted based on four objectives and these were to: Examine the current system used to provide Current Awareness Services at National Library Uganda, Determine the challenges faced by the National Library Uganda in providing Current Awareness Services using the current Awareness System, Establish the requirements necessary to develop a Current Awareness System for National Library Uganda and develop a Current Awareness System for the National Library of Uganda in order to provide timely updates to users about the available information. The study employed a case study while adopting a qualitative research approach to collect data from the respondents. Interviews, observations and documentation methods were used to collect the data from the respondents. We the researchers purposively selected 1 librarian and 10 library users at National Library of Uganda. The current awareness system used at the National Library of Uganda is manual, paper based tiresome and is poorly located. The challenges of this system were: Inadequate funds to run the available system, low levels of ICT among library staff and users, language differences in the library, limited professional skill to run the system, lack of awareness among the users about the available current awareness services in the library, effective barriers and unfavorable government policies. The functional requirements that we needed to develop an electronic current awareness system were a system user interface, authenticity of the system, audit tracking, reporting requirement, administrative functions, regulatory function. The non-functional requirements were reliability, data integrity, scalability, usability, system security and maintenance. The study recommended that an electronic current awareness system should be developed to update users about the new library acquisitions available. Other recommendations were to regularly users on new acquisitions, improvise more ICT services in the library, engage users more to make communication easy in case of need of updates.