Undergraduates’ Perception Towards Incorporating Video Repository with Institutional Repository at the Library, Trincomalee Campus, Eastern University, Sri Lanka: A need Analysis

Abstract

Undergraduates of the Department of Languages and Communication Studies of the Faculty of Communication and Business Studies, Trincomalee Campus have to produce a digital story for the course ‘basic video production’. As the students’ productions are preserved only in the form of digital video discs, a lack of efficiency in preservation and retrieval was identified. Hence, the aim is to explore the preferences and perceptions of the undergraduates regarding initiating a video repository on the Institutional Repository. Therefore, the preferences and perceptions of the undergraduates on video repositories, the present status of retrieval and referencing of the videos produced by the undergraduates, and their willingness toward archiving the digital story produced by them on the Institutional Repository were analysed. A descriptive survey was carried out for data collection by self-administrated semi-structured questionnaires using Google forms. Data were analyzed using MS office Excel. According to the preferences and perceptions on video repositories, more than 72% prefer to refer to videos produced by previous batches of the undergraduates. According to the present status of the video referencing and retrieval only about 22% of them are aware of video repositories and only 1.6% have access to repositories related to their field. Further, their dissatisfaction regarding the current retrieval system, lack of access to other repositories and lack of availability of their preservation systems were also identified. Further, their positive attitude towards preserving their creation in the repositories was identified. However, utilizing cloud storage and requesting approval from creators to download the creation were recommended along with expanding this study with all other students and staff of the Trincomalee Campus.