King Faisal Islamic Studies and Research Center Website in reality: Evaluation Case Study. 1

Abstract

This study makes evaluation to the website of King Faisal Islamic Study & Research Center (KFISRC) in relation to its site, advanced design, services rendered, public users and easy-to-search including its discharged duties; content, form and scope.

The study aims to evaluate the website of KFISRC published in the Internet as well as the volume of its sample users, and to determine the motivations of use.

The study was conducted on the Second Semester in 1426H. / 2005G. The researcher has relied in the evaluation case study on "on-line access" in the Internet; a matter which was imposed by the nature and objectives of the study and followed by an evaluation-analysis methodology based on the measures derived from Website & Information Resources Measures in the Internet.

The information were gathered using the questionnaire forms which were distributed to a random sample of 15% of the society slide subject of the study totaling 1755 of post-graduate female students; i.e. Master degree; enrolled in Library & Information, Arabic Language and History Departments of Faculty of Arts & Humanities , King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah; and post-graduate female students; i.e. Master degree; enrolled in Faculty of Da'wa & Fundamentals of Religion, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah Al-Mukarramah, including male and female staff of KFISRC. The study has reached to the number of findings, mainly as follows:

The volume of the users has reached to 40.7% of the sampling. One of the reasons of the decreasing percentage in the number of the site users of KFISRC is that 32.4% did not know about the existence of the site in the Internet; whereas, 24.1% of the sampling whose most important motivation to use the site is to know whether the resources searched by them would be available in the data-bases of the KFISRC or not.

39.3% of the sampling desired that the site of KFISRC should identify its services; and nearly 31% of them have shown their satisfaction about the results of the research link, while about 29% of them have shown their satisfaction about quantity of information acquired from the site. In fact, 22.8% of the sampling stated that it would not be necessary to visit the site and 9% indicated that the site lacks the mail service as the prescribers could not know about the updates.

Taking the findings reached by the study into consideration, and in order to promote the site services better in future, the researcher has made the following recommendations, mainly as follows:

To identify the services to be rendered to users; the types and methods of utilizing them comprehensively and accurately, use of multi-media technologies, illustrations, permanent information updates, and mail every updates to all prescribers. 

To appoint 24 hour/day professional and responsible supervisor to monitor the site, meet the users' needs, reply to their inquiries, make every improvement to the website and launch the same not only in the developer's site but also throughout the Internet.