University Students? Perceived Ease of Use and Intention to Use: the Library?s Online Public Access Catalogue

The advent of Internet has revolutionized the way we access and use library catalogues today. Information about library holdings is now available through the library’s online public access catalogue (OPAC). The gradual development of bibliographic standards, enormous advances in computers and communication technologies and the growth of bibliographic utilities and networks have led to the design and development of online catalogues. OPACs for libraries appeared in the 1980s and then Web-based OPACs began to emerge in the late 1990s. The Web OPACs are a natural progression in technological development and could be termed as an advanced second generation OPAC (Hildreth, 1991). It is an improvement on traditional OPACs serving as a gateway to the resources not only held by a particular library but also to the holdings of other linked libraries and to regional, national and international resources. Some academic and special libraries in Bangladesh are slowly moving towards acquiring Web OPACs. It is expected that the Web OPACs will eventually provide links to outside sources such as publishers, corporate sources, journal titles, tables of contents and finally full-text databases.

Md. Maidul Islam secured 1st class 1st position in both his BA (Hons) and Masters from the Department of Information Science & Library Management, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. His areas of research include Human Computer Interaction, Informatics, Information Literacy, Information Management, Information Science, Information Theory (Mathematics)