User Acceptance Of Academic Digital Libraries

Promoted by rapid development and application of information technology, the traditional libraries are transforming to digital libraries. Popularization of Internet rapidly changes user’s information needs and habits in the traditional environment. Driving by users, academic libraries are breaking the restrictions of physical entities to provide effective connections between users and digital resources. Academic digital libraries will rapidly reinforce traditional libraries’abilities of literature resources storage and improve their service performance to meet users’changing needs. However, the expected value of academic digital libraries cannot be judged by money spent, but by the utilization of their users.In fact, facing variety of quick and direct ways to access to information resources provided by the internet, users have less intent to use digital libraries. It’s very urgent for academic digital libraries to know why the users accept or refuse to use and how these happen, so they can improve performance and service to level up user’s satisfaction and performances.This paper first comprehensive analyzed technology acceptance theory, social cognitive theory, innovation diffusion theory and the theory of information seeking, then applied the technology acceptance model and combined with the development of China’s digital library, finally a technology acceptance model for users in academic digital libraries is proposed. This model has two user interface characteristics, three organizational context characteristics and two individual characteristics which separately affects perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, thus indirectly affects users’behavioral intention. According to relevant research results, this paper proposed hypotheses for variables and their relationships in this model, and designed measurements.The paper then did empirical analysis through sending questionnaires to students of Wuhan University. According to 208 valid questionnaires, the structural equation model analysis was used to verify the theoretical models and research hypothesis, and the final model was made through amendments. Application of the model can accurately explain and predict the behavioral intention of academic digital library users and the result optimized the relevant research at present.Empirical results show that:perceived usefulness is a determinant of user acceptance of academic digital libraries, while perceived ease of use has no direct impact on behavioral intention, but has significant impact on the perceived usefulness; screen design and terminology only has impact on perceived ease of use, and have no impact on perceived usefulness; improving the relevance and the accessibility can increase perceived ease of use; relevance is positively correlated with perceived usefulness; users’computer self-efficacy and domain knowledge positively affects perceived ease of use, and computer self-efficacy have a greater impact.The research results of this thesis provide a specific guidance for academic digital libraries to improve system functions, services and management. The research will be the basis for future researches, which will use dynamic research methods to analyze the whole process of user acceptance of academic digital libraries from the dimension of time.