ABSTRACT

OPAC is the tool to find material and being use in many years. There a lot of
advantages if using OPAC as searching tools. OPAC station usually located in the
library and the user that came to the library can use it. To investigate the usage
of OPAC, we have do research by distributing the questionnaire to the student in
UiTM Shah Alam that came from various faculties. The result from the survey
shows that the usage of OPAC is low among the student. Many factor that make
the level of usage of OPAC among student low. The major factor is the lack of
promotion from the management of library itself and from the lecture. Most of
the student knows the OPAC service that has in the library but did not know how
to use it. They did not been approach to use OPAC as medium to find material in
the library.

This makes the student more comfortable to find the material

manually. Although OPAC have many advantages but it not been fully utilize by
the user that came into the library. Furthermore the usage of OPAC becomes
lower because there certain student that use OPAC to find the material but they
did not find what they want. This is one of disadvantages that we discover in our
survey at PTAR 1 Library in UiTM Shah Alam. Most of respondent agree that OPAC
can make the process of searching become faster but the lack of knowledge
about using OPAC has make them rare to us OPAC. The purpose of our study to
investigate the awareness student about the OPAC and from this research we
hope OPAC or Online Pubic Access Catalog can be the first medium to be use by
student as tools to find material or information in the library.