Exploring librarians’ social media use intentions: Insight into university libraries online service readiness

Abstract

The successful adoption of technology in organizations requires an adequate understanding of the end-user’s perception and intentions regarding the use of such a system, as ignoring these factors leads to avoidable resource wastage. This phenomenon underscores the overall objective of the current study, which is to examine librarians’ social media use intentions in university libraries, employing performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), and facilitating conditions (FC) from the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) framework. The survey research design and multistage sampling procedure guided the study. Data were collected from 286 (88.8%) out of the 322 librarians surveyed in the selected university libraries in Southwest Nigeria. Findings revealed that PE had the strongest effect on librarians’ intentions to use social media tools in university libraries, while EE had the weakest effect. In between these two extremes is FC. While each construct moderately predicted librarians’ social media use intentions independently, the composite effect of the three constructs yielded a low prediction of the dependent variable. The study concludes that widespread adoption and use of technology by library stakeholders are more likely when individuals perceive the technology to have high-performance potential, find it easy to use, and benefit from adequate and sustainable institutional support.