DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH: PROTOTYPING IN WEB OPAC FOR INDONESIAN CHILDREN

As a searching tool for bibliography sources in libraries, OPAC should provide convenience to meet the users’ information needs, with notes that every user has different needs and characteristics. OPAC at large libraries in Indonesia, including the National Library of Republic Indonesia, is designed without adjusting children’s ability and is mostly used for adults. The need for children’s OPAC development in Indonesia and children’s unique characteristics in searching strategies is defined as problem backgrounds. Therefore, this study aims to develop a simple search OPAC in simulated prototype form. The Design and Development method is used by adapting stages of the prototyping model. The participants in this research consisted of two information technology experts, an expert at child information service & resources for the OPAC prototype validation test, and ten librarians for the OPAC prototype usability test. The data analysis technique used the Likert scale and qualitative descriptive analysis. The study showed that the designed OPAC prototype was considered very feasible according to compatibility OPAC to information retrieval system criteria for children with the result of 80.5% and 72.1% on its usability tests by the librarians at Pustakalana Children’s Library, the Indonesia University of Education Library and Library of the Ministry of Education and Culture Republic of Indonesia. Overall reviews from participants in qualitative description revealed that the appearance and features of OPAC need to be improved in some aspects and develop an advanced search standard to meet the needs of librarians, parents, and teachers, who guide the children to search in the future