A virtual library orientation tool for undergraduate students at Team University

Abstract

The project is developed to offer library orientation guidelines for freshmen and women of Team University Library Kampala in a bid to introduce them and make them familiar to library services at the convenience of their areas of residence. The objectives of the project were to develop a virtual orientation tool for the undergraduate students at team university which was to enable them to equip the students with the knowledge about the dos and don’ts in the library. The security measures in the library, the library activities and how they are conducted and the services offered in the library, to assess how Team University conducts the undergraduate student’s orientation, to elicit the requirements for designing a student’s orientation tool, to develop a virtual undergraduate student’s orientation tool for Team University, to test and validate the virtual undergraduate student’s orientation tool at Team University. The project used a case study design including both qualitative and quantitative methods. The data collection techniques were questionaries to various respondents who were selected purposively and Interviews to staff members. The respondents were 10 students, 5 staff members and 4 librarians making a total of 19 respondents who were interviewed physically at the University premises. The findings of the project indicated the kind of information materials normally borrowed out. As could be seen from data analysis, books 9(85.7%) were the most borrowed out. This was followed by magazines represented by 6(10.7%), newspapers 3(3.6%) was the third and finally encyclopedias ranked last 1(1%) of the information materials normally borrowed out. The project also indicated attendance ratio for physical orientation, problems faced and necessitated the need for online orientation. The project also revealed the services offered by the library including the academic resources, current awareness services, reading space, computer research services among others. The study also concludes that books are the most borrowed out information materials but however there are a lot of challenges associated with the management of these materials using the current orientation system. Thus, it is expedient to adopt an online library Orientation system (proposed system) at Team University library for more efficient and reliable operation of the library