Limitless: A Mobile Application Featuring Next Generation Library Facilities For the Bangladeshi University Students

Abstract

The University library is one of the parts and parcels of the universities that can assist students and teachers teaching and learning work by providing necessary services related to in-formation sharing, book search, book borrow, research document access, and reading room facilities, among others. A vast amount of the literature works related to library facilities emphasize providing services via offline mode rather than online mode. Most of the existing works on online-based library services focus on a single or limited number of library facilities and resources. The existing research works on university library facilities do not consider multiple library resources, different types of users, and multiple features at the same time. Thus, the existing university library related works mainly suffer from the shortage of library resources along with higher time and cost wastage. To tackle with the existing challenges, this paper presents a mobile application featuring next-generation library facilities for university students in Bangladesh. Our proposed limitless mobile application provides several features for students like book or research document search, borrow, order and access, payment and checkout, course enrollment, reading room allocation, request or donate a book, history, notifications, track order, complaint, among others. By using our proposed application, one member of the university library can access the resources of other university libraries via the membership/join feature. Our review result indicates that the majority of the student users are satisfied with the usefulness and necessity of the proposed mobile application features.