LIBRARIANS PERCEPTION OF BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE POLICIES: BENEFITS FOR UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Abstract

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an initiative that permits library staff to use a personally owned device to perform official tasks and access electronic library information. The most frequently used personally owned devices are mobile phones, tablets, iPad and laptops. The practice of encouraging personally owned computing devices within professional organizations is becoming more and more acceptable, as this practice enables the organisation to transfer the investment costs of desktop hardware into their employees (Pillay, 2013).

The university libraries are faced with difficult economic times and university budget cuts (Tenopir & Kaufman, 2010). Hence, BYOD encourages library staff to use their personal devices to carry out official tasks, this will reduce the cost of hardware purchase and maintenance. Despite the fact that university libraries are faced with budget cuts and BYOD has been reported in many organisations as one of the ways to reduce the cost of hardware purchase. It has been observed that university libraries in Nigeria have not yet fully adopt BYOD policies. It is on this background that this study investigates librarians perception of BYOD policies; identify perceived benefits and shortcomings of BYOD to University libraries in Nigeria.

The specific objectives of this study are to find out the knowledge of BYOD among librarians, establish the availability of BYOD policies and perceived benefit of BYOD to the university libraries in Nigeria.

A descriptive survey research design will be adopted for this study and a self-structured questionnaire will be used as the major instrument for data collection. The questionnaire will be distributed to the respondents during the Annual Nigerian Library Association Conference that will be held in July 2018 in Abeokuta, Ogun State Nigeria. The choice of administrating the questionnaire at this venue is due to the fact that this conference draws many participants from all the libraries in Nigeria. The target population of this study comprises all 152 and a simple random sampling technique will be used for sample size. The data collected for this study will be subjected to inferential and descriptive statistical analysis using percentage, frequency count, standard deviations and means. The data will be analyzed using SPSS version 22.