Time Series Analysis on Students’ Patronage of an Electronic Library: Case Study of John Harris Library (E-Learning Centre) University Of Benin

The University has unique duty of initiating, innovating, training and supporting scientific research, to shape the society. This is reinforced by the electronic libraries in academic institutions, which fosters students' literacy, ease of study and research. This work studies students' patronage of the e-library (E-Learning Centre) in John Harris Library, University of Benin as a function of time and make predictions and recommendations for future occurrences using time series models. Some models of Time Series were applied and analysed using Zaitun Time Series Software to a 4 year data (2009)(2010)(2011)(2012) retrieved from the E-learning Centre, John Harris Library, University of Benin and forecasts were made based on these analyses. The results from one of the models; Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing (Multiplicative), was found to have best described our data having the lowest Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 78521.524167 and predicted a total of 15,952 patronages for year 2013 against the historical data of 23,107 patronages for year 2009; 22,455 patronages for year 2010; 11,707 patronages for year 2011; and 16,814 patronages for year 2012. The forecast reveals a decrease in the patronage of students to the e-library centre. Suggestions were made to the Library management such as increase awareness and incentives for users as well as improvement on service delivery.