The intention to use mobile digital library technology: A focus group study in the United Arab Emirates

IGI Global (“IGI”) granted Brunel University London the permission to archive this article in BURA (http://bura.brunel.ac.uk).This paper presents a qualitative study on student adoption of mobile library technology in a developing world context. The findings support the applicability of a number of existing constructs from the technology acceptance literature, such as perceived ease of use, social influence and trust. However, they also suggest the need to modify some adoption factors previously found in the literature to fit the specific context of mobile library adoption. Perceived value was found to be a more relevant overarching adoption factor than perceived usefulness for this context. Facilitating conditions were identified as important but these differed somewhat from those covered in earlier literature. The research also uncovered the importance of trialability for this type of application. The findings provide a basis for improving theory in the area of mobile library adoption and suggest a number of practical design recommendations to help designers of mobile library technology to create applications that meet user needs

Finite Element Analysis of Nonlinear Shell Structures With Uncertain Material Property

[[abstract]]The statistical dynamic responses of geometrically nonlinear shell structures with stochastic Young's modulus of elasticity are investigated in this study. In general, large deformation of the shell structures must be considered when shell structures are under excessive loading, and then the governing equations of the shell structures become nonlinear since the stiffness matrix of the system is related to the deflection. In this paper, the stochastic finite element method along with the perturbation technique is used to deal with statistical responses of shell structures with structural randomness; in particular, the Newton–Raphson iteration procedure in conjunction with Newmark scheme is adopted to solve the nonlinearity of the dynamic governing equation of shell structures. Some results obtained by the perturbation technique and those from the Monte Carlo simulation approach show a good agreement. Finally, it should be emphasized that these statistically dynamic responses are very useful for estimating the reliability of structures