Do digital students show an inclination toward continuous use of academic library applications? A case study

Highlights

• Study is based on continuance usage intention of mobile library application (MLA) at Pakistani context.

• Methodology integrates service quality, MLA affinity and PEOU in extended expectation confirmation model.

• Service quality, confirmation and MLA affinity have strong indirect impact on CUI of MLA.

• PEOU, satisfaction, PU and MLA affinity have significant mediating impact on CUI of MLA.

• Over all model shows the strong CUI of MLA in Pakistan.

Abstract

Rapid use of internet-based applications like mobile library applications (MLA) are depicting the modern era of digital students and literature broadly discussed the initial adoption of MLA among students. However, there is a need to investigate the continuance use intention of applications to overcome an acceptance-discontinuance phenomenon. Therefore, this research was performed for the empirical support toward continued usage of MLA by integrating an extended expectation confirmation model (EECM), technology acceptance model (TAM), media affinity theory, and service quality. This study worked on the focus of uncovering the factors which were creating hindrance in long term use of MLA. It was conducted with the self-controlled cross-sectional survey-based study. An overall 307 surveys were collected to verify the proposed theoretical model with structural equation modelling (SEM) technique. Finding of the study inferred that service quality, confirmation, MLA affinity, perceived usefulness, satisfaction and perceived ease of use are explaining the direct or indirect strong influence on continuous use of MLA. Current research empirically assessed to expose the deep intuition toward users' continuous usage intention of MLA. Outcomes will oblige as a controller for operative choices in development and resource distribution toward confirming the accomplishment of the mobile library application's mission and vision.

Introduction

The drastic rise in wireless technologies especially mobile applications are transforming students into digital students, schools into digital schools and universities into digital universities. Digital students are defined as “students who use digital technologies more than the traditional one.” Defined by Gartner (2015), the mandate for mobile apps development will raise five times quicker than interior information technology organizations' dimensions. As reported in the survey, 42% of organizations are expected to spend at an average of 31% on the development of mobile apps (Gartner, 2016). According to Ju et al. (2017), downloading of mobile applications reached 115% year-over-year-growth. Categorically explaining, downloading of productivity and utility apps grows to 150% and social apps up to 203% (Hsiao et al., 2016). Hence, we can predict that individuals are using mobile applications for a variety of diverse purposes like shopping, internet surfing, for tracking parcels, as route guides through google map, playing games, for social media sites, reading the newspaper and as well as for library services, etc., (Ali, Rafique, et al., 2019; Huh & Kim, 2008; Omotayo & Haliru, 2019).

Digital library gave boast to knowledge and resources (Omotayo & Haliru, 2019). Nowadays almost all research and educational material are available online. Therefore, digital students prefer to use digital, online or mobile libraries more frequently than the traditional library resources (Lee et al., 2012). Hence, to facilitate digital students, educational institutes are quickly adopting mobile applications like mobile library applications (MLA), to provide easy and fast contact to a diversity of digital resources, with rapid searching and browsing by overcoming temporal and spatial constraints (Omotayo & Haliru, 2019). Literature has identified three major types of libraries that are defined in Table 1 above.

For better leverage of MLA benefits, public and private libraries must understand the behaviour of the users that cannot succeed without a deep understanding of how people or organizations are using emerging technologies such as MLA (Seethamraju et al., 2018). For example, the current research was conducted at COMSATS University Islamabad Pakistan (CUI) which adopted MLA in spring 2014 with the name INSIGNIA ILS. However, its success depends on the initial acceptance by its intended user. This research is an extension of our previous work in which we measured the user's inspirations toward the initial acceptance of INSIGNIA ILS (Rafique et al., 2020). However, in current work, we discussed the long-term practicability of a new information system (IS) that hinges on the continuous behaviour of the user than on primary adoption. However, a lot of this kind of techniques were applied in developed countries such as in China, South Korea, USA, Israel and Taiwan (Cheng, 2014; Joo & Choi, 2016; Yoon, 2016). Despite this, we are unable to find an adaptation of these techniques in developing countries. A brief analysis of this adaptation is given in Table 2.

Therefore, one of the motivations of this research is a focus on the continuance usage instead of initial acceptance of MLA in academic libraries of Pakistan. Besides the investment of huge resources in education sectors within developing countries, users are still not using MLA in their study era. Hence, it is a need of an hour to keep intended users on MLA for a longer period, which is being developed with a massive investment of emerging country (Fu & Inskip, 2019; Yoon, 2016). As investment was done to facilitate users, so it is expected to be used continuously by the users for their aims and objectives. For this reason, the current research will report the following research interrogations (RQ1): Is EECM suitable for investigating the continuance use intention of MLA in academic libraries of Pakistan? (RQ2): How do the MLA drives of early acceptance decision effect the MLA continuance intention to practise in Pakistan?

To address the research queries, we proposed research model that is grounded on empirically authenticated existing theoretical models, i.e., the extended expectation confirmation model (EECM) (Bhattacherjee, 2001b), technology acceptance model (TAM) (Davis, 1989), along with service quality and MLA affinity theory (Perse, 1986). To clarify the extensive improvements in the clarification of the initial adoption and use behaviour of MLA, TAM is the most suitable model for this study. On the other hand, continuance usage intention is the major issue after the initial adoption of technology for long-term viability. Hence, for this purpose, EECM is the best-suited model for the current study. Besides that, consistency depends on the service quality and MLA affinity (perceived importance) of the applications, therefore, service quality and MLA affinity were integrated with the theoretical models. Thus, by integrating these two empirically validated models along with service quality and MLA affinity, we will try to explore the major factors of original adoption of a system, that will ultimately lead to continuance usage intention of MLA. Expected research outcomes will help the developers in realizing the important factors toward the continuance use of MLA, which will be considered while developing the application to overcome the fear of the use.

Our research contribution is twofold. At first, we integrated TAM (Davis, 1989) with EECM (Bhattacherjee, 2001b) for improving the understandability of continuance intention to use MLA along with service quality and MLA affinity. To the best of our knowledge, it's the first study that integrated TAM (Davis, 1989) and EECM (Bhattacherjee, 2001b) to identify the continuance usage of MLA with affinity theory (Perse, 1986) in developing nation context i.e., Pakistan. Secondly, investigation of an individuals' determinant toward continuance intention to use MLA will donate to the extensive body of scientific facts, that was not addressed so for in continuance usage intention toward MLA. It is very important to investigate this, because the majority of the researchers heavily focused on the investigation of initial adoption, however, this study hunts for the examination of a continuance usage intention of MLA which is very vital for long term practicability of IS (Bhattacherjee, 2001b).

Henceforth, the focus of current research is on the continuance usage of MLA, i.e., INSIGNIA ILS particularly focusing on the developing country. Pakistan government allocated a huge budget for ICT and continuously developing ICT infrastructure for its people. Hence, the users must be kept on board for a longer period, which ultimately helps us in updating the technology over time. In the current research, all the collected responses from the users will be analysed using statistical package for social science (SPSSv23) and analysis of moment structure (AMOSv23) tools. As it will help in receiving the closer look toward the factors which might be the expected barriers toward continuance usage.

Section two comprised of a brief explanation of both theoretical models integrated into this study along with service quality and MLA affinity. After that, the projected research model along with their statistical hypothesis is presented, followed by the proposed methodology. The article is concluded with the results which are followed by conclusion and limitations of the study.