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The purpose of this study is to measure the perceptions and use of cloud services by the students of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The specific objective of this study is to know what perceptions students have about cloud services, why and how they use cloud for academic activities.

For understanding the use of cloud services among the students of Dhaka University, a quantitative survey was carried out to collect data. Printed questionnaires were distributed among the students in different departments and university library. Both open- and close-ended questions were included in the questionnaire. A total of 329 students responded in this survey and the response rate was 85.5%. The collected data were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.

Findings revealed that students are generally aware of cloud services and majority of the respondents use cloud for different purposes. Students used cloud for storage, back up and collaboration purposes and some of Google features are widely used by majority of the students for academic purposes.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first time an effort has been made to measure the use of cloud services among the students of University of Dhaka. This study will help to raise cloud service awareness among the students and encourage the authorities to adopt appropriate strategies and policies to resolve cloud adoption in university setting. Specially, Center of Excellence in Teaching and Learning of Dhaka University can take some initiatives in this case.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the initial understanding of what perceptions have the faculty members of Dhaka University and how they use cloud for academic activities.

A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect responses from the faculty members of Dhaka University. An online questionnaire was sent out to the faculty members of Dhaka University via e-mail. The questionnaire was both open and close-ended. Overall, 125 respondents participated in this survey and convenience sampling method was used. Mann–Whitney and chi-square test were carried out to see the influence of demographic characteristics on cloud use for teaching and learning activities.

The results showed that faculty members are generally aware of cloud computing, and they are using some of the cloud applications for teaching and learning purposes. They use cloud for research, collaboration, faculty-students engagement, student supporting activities and sharing course materials. They identified limited wireless access or internet facilities, lack of ICT infrastructure and lack of cloud training and knowledge as major constraints. However, these constraints are mainly related to the poor IT infrastructure and limited access to internet, which may also lead to other constraints.

This is the first time an attempt has been made to explore the perception and use of cloud among the faculty members in a public university, Bangladesh. The findings of this study may shed light to other align research areas of cloud computing in Bangladesh.

The purpose of this study is to understand the information security behaviour of the students of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh in the use of smartphones. Bangladesh is well-known as one of the largest and fastest growing mobile phone market of the world, and the University of Dhaka is also the largest student’s assembly in the country in terms of using smartphones. Besides, the rising use of smartphones is also likely to be typical of other sub-continent countries.

To gain an understanding of the information security behaviours of the students of University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a quantitative survey method was deployed in revealing the approaches of the students towards avoidance of various security risks. A total of 356 students participated in the study, although eight of the participants did not carry out the full survey because they do not use smartphones. The collected data were analysed with suitable statistical methods.

The findings of the study reveal that students of University of Dhaka possess a moderately secure behaviour in terms of avoiding harmful behaviours, using useful phone settings and add-on utilities and disaster recovery. This study also shows that the students do not behave securely in all aspects of using different security features in the same way, and it also varies somewhat according to gender, and between faculties and institutions. The university library is recommended as the focus for instruction and guidance on the best practice in smartphone use by students.

The study does not include any other universities of Bangladesh except University of Dhaka due to the shortage of time. A further study can be conducted to gain an understanding in a greater extent by including students of the other universities and perhaps also other countries.

This is the first paper in Bangladesh related to the study of information security behaviour regarding the use of smartphone among the student of University of Dhaka. This study will help to raise information security awareness among the students and encourage the authorities to adopt appropriate strategies and policies to resolve information security risks in the use of smartphones. Specially, the university library can take some initiatives in this case, such as providing advice, seminars, workshops and lectures to make the students aware about security issues.

The paper deals with the challenges and opportunities of enabling resilience of the built environment through building regulations and codes in a developing country context. The purpose of this paper is to explore how voluntary compliance can be achieved, drawing from the views of key stakeholders in this field.

Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is a central hub of more than 20 million people. The city is growing rapidly in an unplanned manner to host the increasing population, creating vulnerability to different hazards including earthquakes, fires and building collapses. The Bangladesh National Building Code (BNBC) and the building and planning regulations of the Capital Development Authority are the key instruments for ensuring safety, but lack of compliance is widespread. The views of relevant stakeholders on issues relating to compliance of safe building codes for ensuring disaster resilience were documented and analysed.

It was found that those involved in construction activities are in most cases not aware of the BNBC; landowners were reluctant to follow regulations and codes to avoid extra cost; and construction workers were not interested in compliance as there were no incentives. While enforced deterrence is required, it has its limitations in a context such as Dhaka. Raising awareness and building capacity at all levels can offer a way forward for voluntary compliance. Incorporation of knowledge on regulations and codes for disaster resilience into university and technical education curricula are likely to allow developing the capacity of built environment professionals and widespread awareness can be raised through training, media and public events.

There are many publications on building regulations and codes, but few specifically focussing on disaster resilience. Also, much of the discussion on regulations and codes deals with compliance through enforcement, but hardly any deal with the idea of voluntary compliance. There are also a lot of publications on disasters in the case study city, Dhaka, but comparatively few on building codes and regulations specifically for disaster resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to use scholarly communication and citation data to rank the universities in a developing country perspective in Bangladesh.

This paper used publication and citation data from Scopus to rank the universities in Bangladesh. The number of papers published in each year during 2008-2018 by the select 33 universities, faculty per capita, the two-year citations and the number cited articles were used to arrive at a yearly weighted score and overall score for each university. The overall score was used to produce the ranking of the universities in Bangladesh.

The findings indicate that the ranking system can be implemented at the national level as an annual exercise to rank the higher education institutions in developing country perspective.

This is the first time an effort has been made to rank the universities in Bangladesh using publication and citation data. The findings of this paper could help policymakers, administrators and academicians to understand how the universities are performing in terms of scholarly activities.

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the information skills of undergraduate students at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

A questionnaire-based survey was administered to obtain data about undergraduates’ information skills. The questionnaire consisted of demographic information, computer and Internet experiences, and a set of ten questions relating to information skills. A total of 199 undergraduate students responded to the survey.

The results indicate that undergraduates’ information skills were poor. Only a few of them were successful in answering some of the questions correctly. There are significant differences in information skills among respondents in terms of gender, age, possession of personal computers and computer and Internet experience. The main reasons for these differences and the general failure in answering the task questions correctly are mostly attributed to the absence of information literacy instruction within the university, lack of online information resources and inadequate information and communication technology facilities.

The findings of this study will help universities in Bangladesh and other developing countries to develop appropriate information literacy instruction at undergraduate level.

This is the first time an effort has been made to assess task-based information skills of undergraduate students in Bangladesh. The findings of this study will help universities in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the developing world to introduce information literacy instruction at undergraduate level.

This paper aims to explore the use of Bostick’s (1992) Library Anxiety Scale (LAS) in a developing country perspective to find out the level of anxiety among university students and to identify the underlying factors that contribute to this phenomenon.

A slightly modified 43-item LAS was used to collect data from 350 students at Dhaka University. For data analysis, negatively worded statements were reverse-scored so that all the statements are scored in the same direction. The statistical significance is measured using Mann–Whitney (M-W) and Kruskal–Wallis (K-W) tests. The M-W tests were conducted to examine the differences in students’ library anxiety scores in terms of their age and educational levels. The K-W tests were conducted to examine the differences in students’ ratings on LAS items in terms of their age and faculty enrolment. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted on the survey data to examine the factors contributing to students’ anxiety. Finally, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the convergent validity of the measures chosen to represent each factor construct.

The result of this study indicated that library anxiety exists amongst Dhaka University students, as most LAS scores fell above 3 on a 5-point Likert scale. The individual differences in terms of gender, age, educational level and frequency of library visit were not significant for most of the items. The EFA, after several iterations, yielded a five-factor solution for library anxiety constructs although only two factors were found to have met the required reliability scores. The CFA, however, failed to produce any meaningful results. This paper made several recommendations to the university library administration to alleviate the problems that appear to have triggered library anxiety.

This is a pioneering study of the use of Bostick’s LAS in Bangladesh. It is hoped that the findings of this study will encourage researchers to develop anxiety scales which would address the need for library services in developing country context.

This paper aims to investigate the use of smartphones for academic purposes by students at Dhaka University, the top-ranked university in Bangladesh.

Students currently using smartphones answered a questionnaire survey, which focused on whether or not students used smartphones for academic works and, if so, for what purposes they used them and their opinion on the advantages of using smartphones for academic purposes. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze demographic and academic characteristics of the students in relation to their smartphone usage. Non-parametric analyses were performed using Mann–Whitney and Kruskal–Wallis tests to compare between students’ demographic and academic variables and their opinion on the advantages of academic use of smartphones.

The findings indicate that a vast majority of university students used smartphones for academic purposes. They, on average and across the board, had a positive perception toward academic use of smartphones. Although there were some differences in terms of gender, age, place of origin and duration of smartphone use, these differences were largely due to fact that a smartphone is a relatively new addition to the life of most students who participated in this study.

Research investigating the academic use of smartphones in the perspective of developing countries is virtually non-existent. This is the first time an effort has been made to examine the use of smartphones by a large sample of university students in Bangladesh.

The main aim of this paper is to assess Dhaka University students' perceptions of ease‐of‐use and their satisfaction with University Library's online public access catalogue (DUL OPAC).

A survey questionnaire was developed and used to collect data on students' demographics, online catalogue use and their perceptions of ease‐of‐use and satisfaction with OPAC. In order to analyze the influence of students' demographic and individual characteristics on their perceptions and satisfaction, Mann‐Whitney and Kruskal‐Wallis tests were carried out.

The results showed that students are overwhelmingly satisfied with the DUL OPAC. Although there are some differences in students' perceptions of and satisfaction with the university OPAC, a formal task‐based usability testing and adopting a user‐centered design can ensure the usability of the OPAC in the future. The paper suggested some heuristic guidelines for designing interfaces for online catalogues.

This is the first time an effort has been made to assess students' perceptions of and satisfaction with a library OPAC in Bangladesh. The authors feel this study may encourage more such research on usability evaluation of OPACs in Bangladesh and beyond.

The main aim of this paper is to report on an examination of the service quality of Dhaka University Library (DUL), a premier public university library in Bangladesh, from its users' viewpoint.

A survey was conducted among faculty, graduate and undergraduate students of DUL using a modified version of SERVQUAL. The gap differences between users' expected and perceived services were calculated. The concept of zone of tolerance was applied to see which items of service quality equal, exceed or fall short of user perception. The study analysed the desired service expectations of the users. Finally, the dimensions of service quality were determined through exploratory factor analysis.

The results of the study showed that DUL services are lagging far behind what is expected by its users. The result of the zone of tolerance showed that most of the items of service quality are not within the range of tolerance. A number of users' desired expectations for service quality are identified. The results obtained through exploratory factor analysis suggest that university library service quality consists of four dimensions – i.e. affect of service (organisational), collection and access, library as a place, and affect of service (personal) – which are different from SERVQUAL's original dimensions.

This is the first time an effort has been made to measure the service quality of a university library in Bangladesh. It is hoped that this study will trigger more research on assessing service quality in various university libraries in Bangladesh.