The Efficiency of the Library in Non-University Higher Learning Institutions in Tanzania: A Case of College of Business Education and Tanzania Public Service College.

Abstract

Library performance has drawn the interest of researchers in different parts of the world and one of the aspects that have been studied is library efficiency which also implies resource utilization. This study examines the resource utilization in libraries of the College of Business Education (CBE) and Tanzania Public Service College (TPSC). The purpose of this study is to examine how academic library in each campus mobilizes resources to provide library services to the campus community, the study also aims to identify factors that might have contributed to the inefficiency of libraries. The study also investigates how to improve the performance of inefficient library at the campus level. A purposive sampling technique was used to pick four libraries from CBE and six from TPSC, ten campuses were included in the study and the study period covers 2015 -2017 and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was adapted to perform efficiency computations. Findings revealed that only 30 percent of libraries was efficient during the period under review while the remaining 70 percent were found to be inefficient (had an efficiency score of less than 1). Only three libraries were performing above the average (50%) during the study period. Findings also record that for inefficient libraries inefficiency was largely caused by the technical inefficiency as evidenced by the average higher measure of relatively scale efficiency (80.9%) as compared to pure technical efficiency. Two libraries representing (20%) were found to be efficient in terms of pure efficiency as it was in the case of overall efficiency. As far as the scale efficiency is concerned findings show three libraries representing (30%) were experiencing scale efficiency over the study period, which means they were operating at their optimal scale during the study period. The study recommends a serious review of the library resource utilization concerning the size of library services across all inefficient libraries.