Browsing by Author "Ernest, Ester"

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Dual function national libraries: A SWOT analysis of the Sokoine National Agricultural Library, Tanzania
(Sokoine University of Agriculture, 2013) Sife, Alfred S.; Ernest, Ester; Bernard, Ronald
A SWOT analysis was conducted for the Sokoine National Agricultural Library (SNAL) in order to understand its strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities and how these affect its performance as a dual function library. This SWOT analysis was achieved through authors’ experience and review of existing documents. The analysis revealed that the strength of the library was on its staff, collection, ICT services and training programmes. SNAL’s weaknesses include limited financial resources, lack of user education programme, inadequate library security, insufficient library facilities and space, underutilization of e-resources and dysfunctional printing unit. A serious weakness is the low attention given to the library’s national mandate, implying that SNAL has not adequately played its role as a national agricultural library. Available opportunities for SNAL include ICT development, legal deposit legislation, joining library consortia, funding opportunities, and outreach activities whereas budgetary constraints and changes in technology are the library’s threats. The library could build on these strengths and opportunities to overcome its weaknesses and threats. Several recommendations have been made based on the SWOT analysis.
Investigating public universities facebook Pages: Extent of users engagement
(International Journal of Academic Library and Information Science, 2015-02) Ernest, Ester; Bernad, Ronald
The development in information technologies have made higher learning institutions to change the way they communicate with their audiences. For instance social media such as face book, tweeter and you tube have been used to communicate with current and prospective students. This study was conducted to investigate the engagement of the facebook pages of public universities in Tanzania. Specifically, the study determined the popularity of the pages, extent to which users put comments upon the posts as well as virality of the messages/posts on the walls. The analysis of the metrics such as popularity, commitment and virality was done to study three Tanzanian public university facebook pages. It was revealed that, the most popular page was SUZA 97.3%followed by UDOM 90.7%, then OUT 71.1%. The study further found that, UDOM facebook page had many comments 81%, followed by SUZA 69.3% then OUT which was below average. The extent to which information were shared in all institutions were below average. This was 41.2%, 1.2% and 4.8% for UDOM, OUT and SUZA respectively.
Research productivity and scholarly impact of forestry researchers at Sokoine University of Agriculture: A bibliometric Analysis
(Sokoine University of Agriculture, 2014-02-14) Sife, Alfred S.; Bernard, Ronald; Ernest, Ester
A bibliometric analysis was conducted to understand the research productivity and scholarly impact of forestry researchers at Sokoine University of Agriculture for the period of 1998 to 2013. Data were obtained using the Publish or Perish software that uses Google Scholar to retrieve scholars’ publications, citations and related metrics. A total of 1031 publications were recorded for all forestry researchers, giving an average of 64.4 publications per year and an annual growth rate of 6.3%. The year 2008 had the most (12.7%) publications followed by 2007 with 9% of all publications while the year 2003 had the lowest (3.2%) number of publications. Majority (88.1%) of the publications were multiple-authored and the degree of collaboration was 0.88. The top ten ranked forestry researchers contributed nearly half (46.3%) of all publications; hence corroborating to the Lotka’s Law of scientific productivity. However, these top ten scholars showed considerable variation since no single scholar maintained the same rank in all nine metrics. These findings suggest that many factors should be considered in combination when evaluating research performance. The study findings call for a paradigm shift for scholars to focus on the scholarly impacts of their publications.