Beyond Technology Acceptance: School Librarians’ Organizational Readiness to Integrate Digital Short-Form and Serialized Reading Platforms
Keywords
school libraries, organizational readiness, digital reading, serialized fiction, platform governance, UTAUT2, Philippines
Introduction
From digitized texts to platformized reading
Digital reading in schools is no longer adequately described as the substitution of a screen for a printed page. Contemporary reading services increasingly operate as platforms: they package texts with subscriptions, recommendation systems, social interaction, episodic release, user accounts, analytics, and continuously changing catalogues. Streaming has accordingly become a useful description of how access to books and other cultural products is organized, even though book markets retain important linguistic, national, and format-specific differences (Spilker and Colbjørnsen 2020). In digital seriality, the interval between installments can also become part of the reading experience, sustaining anticipation, conversation, and participation across a distributed audience Linkis (2021). These arrangements change not only where reading occurs but also who selects, ranks, moderates, licenses, and preserves what readers encounter.
Digital short-form and serialized reading platforms occupy a distinctive part of this landscape. They distribute flash fiction, short stories, comics, episodic novels, and other texts in segments suited to intermittent or mobile reading. Some platforms offer professionally edited educational collections; others depend substantially on user-generated content and social participation. The category therefore includes materially different institutional propositions. A subscription service with age-banded resources, administrative controls, and vendor support does not present the same collection-development problem as an open platform whose catalogue is produced by users and ordered by engagement. Treating both simply as “digital reading technology” obscures differences in authority, licensing, pedagogical fit, privacy, content provenance, and safeguarding.
The appeal of these platforms should nonetheless be taken seriously. Qualitative and mixed-method research on story-sharing platforms identifies connection, virtual community, collective participation, and varied literacy roles as features that can support reading and identity work (Flores Taboada et al. 2024; Korobkova and Collins 2019). Digital access can also extend reading beyond library opening hours and make multiple formats available through devices already embedded in everyday life. Yet access and engagement are not equivalent to improved literacy. Meta-analytic evidence indicates a small overall comprehension advantage for paper over screens, while also showing that effects vary with time pressure, text genre, study design, and reading context (Delgado et al. 2018; Clinton-Lisell 2019). The relevant question for school libraries is therefore not whether digital or print reading is categorically superior. It is whether a particular platform, for a particular student population and instructional purpose, can be integrated under conditions that protect educational value, equitable access, privacy, and reader welfare.
School librarians as institutional gatekeepers and integrators
School librarians sit at the intersection of these decisions. Their work joins collection development, reader services, information and digital literacy, instructional collaboration, resource licensing, and the ethical stewardship of access. International guidelines explicitly position school-library collections as encompassing physical and digital resources and call for librarians to work with the wider school community in developing digital knowledge and responsible citizenship (IFLA School Libraries Section Standing Committee 2015). Research on school librarians’ technology leadership likewise shows that integration is enabled by supportive principals, professional-development opportunities, expertise, and teacher collaboration, while role ambiguity, time, staffing, and institutional structures can constrain leadership (Johnston 2012; Wine 2016; Baker 2016). Evidence from secondary schools more broadly also links principals’ technology leadership and professional development with teachers’ technology integration (Thannimalai and Raman 2018).
This institutional role is especially consequential in the Philippines. National standards seek to improve library access, administration, management, and collections and enjoin school systems to support their implementation (Department of Education, Republic of the Philippines 2011). At the same time, the educational context makes careful reading provision urgent: in PISA 2022, only 24% of participating Filipino 15-year-olds reached at least Level 2 proficiency in reading, compared with an OECD average of 74% (OECD 2023). That disparity supplies a compelling reason to examine new reading services, but it does not warrant assuming that any novel platform will improve comprehension. It instead raises the standard of evidence and care required of schools. A platform must be considered in relation to curriculum, language, disability and connectivity, the availability of devices, teacher mediation, family expectations, and the opportunity costs of already constrained library budgets.
The school librarian is consequently neither a sovereign adopter nor merely an end user. Platform integration can require approval from administrators or governing boards, procurement and recurring subscription decisions, coordination with teachers and information-technology personnel, acceptable-use and privacy rules, parent communication, student account management, content review, and evidence that the resource is being used well enough to justify renewal. A librarian may personally regard a platform as useful and easy to operate while the school remains unable—or unwilling—to authorize, finance, govern, or sustain it. Conversely, a school may procure a platform without creating the instructional routines and professional capacity needed for meaningful use. Adoption is thus a negotiated organizational accomplishment.
Why technology acceptance is necessary but insufficient
The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) explains behavioral intention and use through performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, with specified moderators (Venkatesh et al. 2003). UTAUT2 extends this account to consumer settings by adding hedonic motivation, price value, and habit (Venkatesh et al. 2012). These constructs remain valuable for identifying how librarians evaluate a platform: whether it appears useful, learnable, socially supported, enjoyable for students, adequately resourced, and worth its cost. A recent systematic review confirms the continued prominence of UTAUT in digital-library adoption research (Abeysekera et al. 2024).
The difficulty is not the constructs themselves but the level of explanation assigned to them. UTAUT2 was developed to explain consumer acceptance, whereas a school library’s decision entails collective authority and coordinated implementation. Price value, for example, is not simply an individual trade-off between benefit and personal cost when subscriptions compete with print acquisitions and administrators control renewal. Social influence is not merely interpersonal encouragement when parents, teachers, accreditation expectations, and school leaders possess different kinds of legitimacy or veto power. Facilitating conditions are not peripheral perceptions when devices, connectivity, technical support, workload, and systems interoperability determine whether the service can operate at all. Most importantly, the acceptability of a platform to one librarian cannot stand in for the readiness of an organization.
Organizational-readiness theory offers the needed shift. Weiner (2009) defines readiness for change through shared commitment to implement a change and shared confidence in collective implementation capability. Readiness depends on the value attached to the change, perceived task demands, resource availability, and situational conditions. Instrument-development research reinforces the distinction between organizational readiness itself and the conditions that may produce it, and it cautions that an organization-level claim requires evidence of agreement among organizational members (Shea et al. 2014). The technology–organization–environment tradition similarly locates adoption in the interaction among characteristics of the innovation, the adopting organization, and its external environment (Tornatzky and Fleischer 1990). In library settings, organizational-readiness research has identified financial resources, institutional practices, size, skills, and data-management and protection concerns as consequential conditions (Jan et al. 2024). Research on digital innovation further treats readiness as an organization-level capability, not an aggregate label for favorable employee attitudes (Lokuge et al. 2019).
For school libraries, this perspective brings into view four linked domains: institutional authorization (administrators, parents, teachers, procurement, and external standards); reader engagement and instructional value (the purposes for which short, serial, multimodal, or participatory texts are selected); implementation capacity (devices, connectivity, staffing, training, support, interoperability, and sustainable funding); and content governance and child protection (age suitability, curation, moderation, privacy, and screen-use expectations). These domains do not discard technology acceptance. They reposition it as one source of evidence within a wider readiness judgment.
As Figure 1 summarizes, individual acceptability remains an input, but responsible integration depends on judgments that are distributed across four organizational domains. The model also distinguishes an adoption decision from a sustainable implementation. Authorization without capacity can produce nominal access; capacity without governance can expose students to unsuitable content or unmanaged data practices; and an engaging platform without instructional purpose can divert scarce resources without advancing the library’s mission. Readiness is therefore better understood as a configuration of commitments, capabilities, and safeguards than as a single favorable attitude.
Research gap, purpose, and contribution
Three gaps follow. First, research on digital-library adoption has emphasized acceptance constructs more often than the collective processes through which school-library resources are approved, curated, implemented, and renewed. Second, studies of digital reading commonly center readers, texts, or comprehension, leaving the institutional work of school librarians underexamined. Third, short-form and serialized platforms unsettle familiar collection-development boundaries because educational subscriptions, commercial reading applications, and user-generated-content environments can appear similar at the interface while demanding substantially different governance.
This study addresses those gaps through a qualitatively led mixed-method analysis of Filipino school librarians’ evaluations of digital short-form and serialized reading platforms. The evidence comprises an exploratory survey of 33 school librarians and five semistructured interviews conducted in late 2025. Because the survey is small relative to the number of modeled acceptance constructs, its estimates are used as descriptive and exploratory evidence rather than definitive hypothesis tests. The interviews provide the principal basis for explaining how adoption judgments are embedded in organizational authority, resources, instructional relationships, and professional obligations. UTAUT2 is retained as a sensitizing framework for individual evaluations, not treated as a complete causal model of organizational adoption.
The study asks:
- How do school librarians evaluate the usefulness, usability, social acceptability, experiential appeal, facilitating conditions, and value of digital short-form and serialized reading platforms?
- What organizational conditions enable or constrain school libraries’ readiness to integrate these platforms?
- How do institutional authorization, reader engagement and instructional value, implementation capacity, and content governance interact in librarians’ accounts of prospective and existing platform use?
The article makes three contributions. Theoretically, it corrects a level-of-analysis problem in technology-adoption research by distinguishing a librarian’s acceptance from a school’s readiness to implement. Empirically, it contributes evidence from Philippine school libraries, a setting in which resource constraints, stakeholder authority, and urgent reading needs make organizational trade-offs unusually visible. Professionally, it reframes platform selection as a governance and curation responsibility: the central question is not merely whether librarians intend to use a technology, but whether schools can authorize, resource, align, safeguard, and sustain it as part of an equitable reading service.
Literature Review and Conceptual Framework
Digital seriality as a platformed reading arrangement
Short-form and serialized reading predate digital media. Newspapers, magazines, chapbooks, comics, and installment novels have long organized reading through brevity, periodicity, and deferred continuation. What digital platforms add is not serialization itself but an infrastructural arrangement that connects the production, circulation, discovery, monetization, and reception of texts. A serialized story may now be revised in response to reader comments, ranked through engagement metrics, surfaced by a recommendation system, and monetized chapter by chapter. The textual installment is consequently embedded in a service whose technical and commercial rules remain partly outside the reader’s—and the library’s—control.
Platformization scholarship explains why this distinction matters. Online platforms extend their economic and infrastructural power into cultural production, making cultural goods contingent on changing interfaces, data practices, governance rules, and market strategies (Nieborg and Poell 2018). In this environment, a work is not simply published and deposited as a stable object. Its visibility, sequence, accessibility, and commercial viability may be continually recalculated. Streaming book services illustrate the same transformation: they combine recurring access, extensive catalogues, recommendation, and usage data, while retaining differences from audiovisual streaming in rights, language markets, and reading practices (Spilker and Colbjørnsen 2020).
Digital seriality further changes the temporal and social organization of reading. Installments create intervals in which readers anticipate, interpret, discuss, and sometimes influence an unfolding narrative. Concurrent narration and audience participation can turn the release schedule itself into a component of the work (Andersen and Linkis 2019; Linkis 2021). Studies of story-sharing platforms similarly describe participation in narrative communities as social and identity work among young people and document heterogeneous roles that move across reading, feedback, affiliation, and writing (Tirocchi 2019; Korobkova and Collins 2019). The platform can therefore support more than convenient access: it can provide visible readership, peer interaction, feedback, and a pathway from reading to writing.
These affordances are educational possibilities, not guaranteed outcomes. Evidence that readers enjoy, discuss, or regularly return to a platform does not demonstrate gains in comprehension, critical literacy, or sustained reading across formats. Research comparing media also cautions against simple technological determinism. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses report an average paper advantage but also substantial variation associated with genre, time constraints, study design, and reading context (Delgado et al. 2018; Clinton-Lisell 2019). The educational value of short-form and serialized reading must therefore be assessed through the interaction of reader, text, task, platform design, and instructional mediation.
For school libraries, “digital short-form and serialized reading platform” is best treated as a functional category rather than a uniform technology class. At least three variants are relevant:
- Curated educational services, in which a vendor supplies age-banded or curriculum-oriented content and administrative controls;
- Commercial reading and publishing platforms, in which professionally produced and user-produced texts coexist under proprietary discovery and monetization systems; and
- Open participatory writing communities, in which social interaction and user-generated content are central to the service.
The variants can overlap, but they distribute responsibility differently. A curated service may offer stronger instructional metadata and content controls while creating subscription dependency. A commercial platform may offer broad cultural relevance and strong engagement while limiting institutional control over recommendations and data. An open writing community may enable participation and authentic audiences while requiring intensive evaluation of content, conduct, privacy, and age suitability. Organizational readiness cannot be judged independently of which variant is being considered.
Collection development under conditions of platform dependence
Collection development in a school library ordinarily entails systematic attention to community needs, curricular relevance, authority, diversity, cost, format, accessibility, and the maintenance of a balanced collection. Digitally rich environments do not eliminate these responsibilities; they alter their object and frequency. Newsum (2016) observes that technological change has expanded school librarians’ collection-development and resource-management work while strengthening the need for leadership around digital resources. Selection increasingly concerns not only individual titles but also an evolving bundle of content, interfaces, contractual rights, metadata, and service conditions.
This shift creates four governance problems. First, access may be licensed rather than owned. A recurring payment can provide immediate breadth but leave the school without enduring holdings when a subscription ends. Renewal thus becomes a new selection decision, dependent on usage evidence, changing prices, and competing budget priorities. Second, the collection is mutable. Providers can add, remove, reclassify, or promote content after initial evaluation. A librarian approving a platform at one point in time may not be approving the same effective collection students encounter later.
Third, discovery is governed as well as content. Search results, popularity rankings, notifications, and recommendations can determine what is practically visible within an ostensibly extensive catalogue. Platformization moves part of the selection function from professional editorial judgment toward algorithmic curation (Nieborg and Poell 2018). Evidence from a child-used video-sharing platform illustrates the practical stakes: recommendation systems shaped exposure to content of variable quality and age appropriateness (Radesky et al. 2024). Although reading platforms require their own study, the mechanism makes clear why collection evaluation must address ranking and recommendation practices rather than only the presence of acceptable titles.
Fourth, user-generated content unsettles conventional signals of authority and control. Self-publishing broadens access to voices and genres that may be neglected by commercial publishing, but it also bypasses familiar editorial, bibliographic, and review infrastructures (Dawson 2008; Pecoskie and Hill 2014). In a school setting, this duality is intensified. Diversity, immediacy, and student authorship may be valuable, yet the same openness can expose learners to mature content, misinformation, harassment, commercial persuasion, or opaque data collection. The professional task is not to reject user-generated content as a class; it is to determine whether the platform provides sufficiently granular curation, moderation, reporting, account, and privacy controls for the intended age group and educational use.
School-library ethics make that assessment substantive rather than merely technical. The IFLA guidelines link digital collections to equitable access, information literacy, privacy, and responsible participation (IFLA School Libraries Section Standing Committee 2015). Research on school librarians and digital citizenship likewise shows that librarians understand safe and responsible technology use as part of their remit but frequently need more time and consistent collaboration with teachers and administrators (Phillips and Lee 2019). Content governance therefore includes both protective controls and educational practices. Filtering may reduce immediate exposure to unsuitable materials, but students also need guided opportunities to understand authorship, recommendation, privacy, reporting, and participation. Safeguarding and intellectual agency should be designed together.
These concerns are especially important when the platform’s consumer interface creates an illusion of institutional simplicity. Ease of registration or navigation says little about data-processing agreements, account recovery, parental consent, accessibility conformance, moderation response, interoperability, or the ability to restrict content by age and instructional context. A platform can be easy for an individual librarian to use while remaining difficult for a school to govern.
Technology leadership as distributed organizational capacity
School librarians are well positioned to connect technology, curriculum, and information practice, but their ability to lead is organizationally produced. Johnston’s study of technology-integration leadership identified supportive principals, professional development, expertise, collaboration, and opportunities to exercise leadership among prominent enablers (Johnston 2012). Subsequent work has continued to position the librarian as both educator and information specialist in digital integration and to frame instructional partnership as a leadership capacity that requires deliberate preparation (Luetkemeyer 2017; Baker 2016). Evidence from secondary schools also connects principals’ technology leadership and professional development with teachers’ integration practices (Thannimalai and Raman 2018). Readiness is therefore not reducible to technical proficiency: it depends on whether the school recognizes, resources, and coordinates the librarian’s leadership role.
Leadership practices at the school or district level are consequential. In a study of one-to-one computing, effective leaders incorporated the library into the institutional vision, invested in librarians’ professional capacity, included them in curriculum and instructional development, and used their expertise to procure and create quality digital resources (Moen 2025). These practices distribute implementation work across formal authority, professional knowledge, and instructional relationships. They also counter a recurrent failure mode in which librarians are expected to support a technology after procurement but are excluded from the decision that produced it.
The distinction between readiness to lead and authority to decide is critical. Librarians may identify a promising platform, understand its content, and be prepared to teach its use, yet lack control over budgets, devices, data governance, or curriculum time. Administrators may possess purchasing authority but lack detailed knowledge of the collection and its student-facing risks. Teachers control important contexts of instructional use, while parents or governing boards may influence acceptable screen use and content boundaries. Information-technology units may determine authentication, networking, security, and compatibility. None of these actors alone embodies organizational readiness.
Readiness is better understood as a relational capacity: relevant actors must be able to reach a legitimate decision, coordinate the necessary work, and respond when the service changes or problems emerge. This formulation avoids romanticizing the librarian as a lone “technology champion.” Champions can initiate attention and translate professional knowledge, but sustained integration requires routines, distributed responsibilities, and institutional memory that survive staff turnover and leadership changes.
From behavioral intention to organizational readiness
UTAUT and UTAUT2 remain useful starting points because organizational decisions are informed by individual evaluations. Performance expectancy directs attention to anticipated benefits; effort expectancy to learnability and operational burden; social influence to valued others’ expectations; facilitating conditions to resources and support; hedonic motivation to enjoyment; and price value to perceived benefits relative to cost (Venkatesh et al. 2003, 2012). In digital-library studies, performance expectancy and facilitating conditions have received substantial empirical attention (Abeysekera et al. 2024).
Three conceptual cautions are necessary when these constructs are transferred to school-library adoption.
First, the focal behavior must be specified. Intending to try a platform, recommend it, request procurement, integrate it into instruction, continue a subscription, and personally use it are different behaviors governed by different authority and resource structures. Combining institutional adopters, individual users, prospective adopters, and non-users under one measure of “behavioral intention” weakens interpretability.
Second, the unit of analysis must match the claim. Individual librarians can report their own expectations, perceptions, and intentions. They cannot, by themselves, supply an organization-level measure merely because they work within an organization. Organizational readiness concerns shared resolve and shared implementation efficacy Weiner (2009). A single informant can offer valuable evidence about readiness conditions, but the resulting account should be described as a professional assessment of organizational readiness rather than as the organization’s verified collective state.
Third, adoption and implementation must be separated. An acquisition decision does not establish that the platform is used consistently, appropriately, or well. Innovation-implementation theory defines effectiveness through the quality and consistency of organizational members’ use and links it to implementation climate and fit with users’ values (Klein and Sorra 1996). Organizational adoption is a decision event; implementation is the coordinated process through which the service becomes embedded in routines. Renewal is a further decision informed by what implementation has produced.
Organizational-readiness theory supplies a bridge across these distinctions. In Weiner’s formulation, readiness combines change commitment—the shared resolve to pursue an implementation—and change efficacy—the shared belief that the organization can execute it (Weiner 2009). Commitment is influenced by how much organizational members value the proposed change. Efficacy depends on appraisals of task demands, available resources, and situational constraints. Digital-innovation research similarly treats readiness as a multidimensional organizational capacity rather than a general climate of enthusiasm (Lokuge et al. 2019). Recent library-sector research demonstrates the relevance of technological practices, financial capacity, skills, organizational scale, and data protection to such assessments (Jan et al. 2024).
The technology–organization–environment framework adds attention to contextual fit (Tornatzky and Fleischer 1990). For the present study, the technological context concerns platform affordances and constraints; the organizational context concerns the school’s resources, governance, leadership, and instructional routines; and the environmental context includes parents, vendors, professional standards, accreditation expectations, connectivity conditions, and broader educational policy. TOE is used here as a contextual scaffold, while organizational-readiness theory provides the central mechanism of commitment and efficacy. UTAUT2 contributes the language of individual acceptability. The frameworks are complementary only when their levels are kept distinct.
A four-domain framework for school-library platform readiness
The literature and the institutional character of school librarianship support a four-domain framework: institutional authorization; reader engagement and instructional value; implementation capacity; and content governance and child protection. These domains are analytically distinct but operationally interdependent.
Reader engagement and instructional value
This domain concerns the purposes a platform is expected to serve and the evidence by which those purposes will be judged. Performance expectancy and hedonic motivation are relevant but insufficiently specific. Student enjoyment may support voluntary reading, but enjoyment is not identical to comprehension or learning. Accessibility may extend service reach, but access does not ensure meaningful engagement. A defensible value proposition identifies the target readers, reading needs, curricular connections, language and format requirements, expected use setting, and appropriate outcomes.
Short texts and serial release may lower the threshold for beginning a reading experience or support repeated contact with a narrative. Participatory features may encourage response, peer connection, and writing. These affordances can be instructionally valuable when deliberately matched to learning goals. They can also produce fragmented attention, superficial completion metrics, or social pressures when the platform’s engagement design is treated as inherently educational. Readiness thus requires a theory of use: who will use the platform, for what activity, under whose guidance, and how the library will know whether the service is worthwhile.
Implementation capacity
Implementation capacity refers to the collective ability to operate and sustain the service. It includes devices, connectivity, authentication, accessibility, platform–system compatibility, staffing, training, technical support, vendor responsiveness, scheduling, and recurring funding. This domain extends UTAUT2 facilitating conditions from individual perception to an analysis of interdependent organizational resources.
Capacity is also stage-specific. Trialing a free platform on a librarian’s device demands far less than providing reliable access across grade levels. A technically successful login does not demonstrate that a one-person library can manage accounts, curate content, teach users, coordinate with teachers, troubleshoot failures, monitor use, and report value. Readiness claims should therefore specify the proposed scale and implementation stage.
Content governance and child protection
Content governance concerns the school’s ability to exercise responsible stewardship over what students can discover, create, share, and disclose. It encompasses selection criteria, age classification, moderation, recommendation, privacy, data retention, advertising, user interaction, reporting, parental communication, and responses to harmful or contested content. This domain has no adequate counterpart in UTAUT2. It may affect performance expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, and price value, but it should not be dissolved into any of them.
Governance involves affirmative educational choices as well as restriction. Libraries must consider diversity, intellectual freedom, privacy, student voice, and opportunities for creative participation alongside safeguarding. The goal is not maximal control; it is accountable, age-appropriate access supported by transparent policy and professional judgment. A paid platform may be valuable precisely because it offers curation and administrative controls unavailable in a free service. Conversely, payment does not itself guarantee adequate governance.
| Readiness domain | Core decision question | UTAUT2 connection | Indicative evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Institutional authorization | Who can legitimately approve, support, fund, and renew the service? | Social influence; price value | Decision rights, leadership sponsorship, procurement rules, stakeholder alignment, renewal criteria |
| Reader engagement and instructional value | For which readers, purposes, and learning activities would the platform add value? | Performance expectancy; hedonic motivation | Reader needs, curriculum fit, accessibility, engagement design, intended outcomes, evaluation plan |
| Implementation capacity | Can the school reliably operate, support, and sustain the intended scale of use? | Facilitating conditions; effort expectancy; price value | Devices, connectivity, staffing, training, interoperability, technical support, recurrent budget |
| Content governance and child protection | Can the school curate access and protect students while preserving meaningful participation? | No direct equivalent; cuts across all acceptance constructs | Age controls, collection policy, moderation, recommendations, privacy, advertising, reporting procedures |
Table 1 makes the level-of-analysis shift explicit. The UTAUT2 constructs are preserved where they clarify librarians’ evaluations, but each is located within a broader decision problem and associated with observable institutional evidence. The final row marks the framework’s most important extension: content governance and child protection cannot be represented adequately as a residual concern within usefulness, ease, social pressure, infrastructure, enjoyment, or price. It is an independent professional and organizational responsibility.
The table also prevents “facilitating conditions” from becoming an undifferentiated category for every institutional barrier. Administrative authorization is not infrastructure; instructional value is not technical support; and content governance is not simply a resource constraint. Keeping the domains separate permits analysis of configurations. A school may have high implementation capacity but weak authorization, strong authorization but poor governance, or a compelling instructional purpose without sustainable resources.
Analytical propositions and mixed-method integration
The framework is used to organize interpretation rather than to claim a new universally validated measurement model. Four analytical propositions guide the study.
Proposition 1: Individual acceptability is necessary but not sufficient for organizational readiness. Positive evaluations of usefulness, ease, enjoyment, or value can motivate advocacy, but integration also requires collective authority and capability.
Proposition 2: Stakeholder influence operates through differentiated authority. Administrators, teachers, parents, students, librarians, and technical staff contribute different resources, judgments, and veto points. Their influence should be analyzed relationally rather than combined into a single perception of social approval.
Proposition 3: Readiness is specific to platform type, use case, scale, and stage. A school can be ready to pilot a curated platform with one class but not to institutionalize an open participatory platform across grade levels. Readiness is therefore conditional, not a permanent organizational trait.
Proposition 4: Governance quality changes the meaning of value. Affordability and engagement cannot be evaluated independently of curation, privacy, age suitability, and professional control. Controls that enable responsible institutional use may constitute part of a platform’s value rather than an external compliance cost.
These propositions establish the study’s mixed-method logic. Survey responses offer a bounded account of how participating librarians evaluate UTAUT2-related attributes. They are not used to infer stable population effects or to declare organizational readiness. Interview evidence is used to identify actors, decision rights, resources, practices, and governance concerns and to explain why similarly favorable attitudes may lead to different institutional possibilities. Integration occurs by comparing the direction and relative prominence of the exploratory survey patterns with the four readiness domains, while preserving discrepancies rather than forcing qualitative material into acceptance constructs.
This approach treats divergence as theoretically informative. For example, librarians may rate facilitating conditions weakly while discussing them extensively, suggesting that infrastructure functions as a threshold constraint rather than a motivational predictor. They may express high hedonic value for students while withholding endorsement because content cannot be curated. They may personally intend to use a platform while anticipating administrative refusal. Such configurations are not anomalies to be averaged away; they are evidence that school-library platform integration is an organizational governance problem as well as a technology-acceptance question.
Methods
Study design and methodological orientation
This article reports a qualitatively led embedded mixed-methods reanalysis of survey and interview data collected from Filipino school librarians. The original thesis design treated the survey as primary and the interviews as explanatory support. The present article reverses that priority for methodological and conceptual reasons. The survey sample is too small to sustain confirmatory inference for a six-predictor structural model, whereas the interviews directly address the organizational processes at the center of the reframed research questions. The qualitative strand therefore provides the principal explanatory account; survey results are retained as exploratory evidence about the distribution and relative prominence of technology-acceptance evaluations.
The design is embedded because a bounded quantitative component is used within a primarily qualitative inquiry, and connected because interview volunteers were recruited through the survey. The strands were collected during the same three-week period and are integrated during interpretation through a statistics-by-themes joint display. Mixed-methods integration is treated as an analytic operation rather than the parallel reporting of two datasets (Fetters et al. 2013; Fetters and Tajima 2022; DeJonckheere et al. 2024).
The study adopts a contextualist orientation. Participants’ accounts are treated as professionally situated interpretations of their schools rather than transparent measurements of a single objective organizational state. At the same time, their descriptions of budgets, approval processes, devices, staffing, subscriptions, and instructional routines refer to material conditions with practical consequences. The analysis therefore attends both to how librarians construct the meaning of platform integration and to the institutional arrangements that enable or constrain it.
Setting, recruitment, and participants
The study focused on school librarians in the Philippines. The Philippine Association of School Librarians (PASLI) authorized distribution of the study invitation to its members. The first author emailed invitations containing a Google Forms survey link to 75 PASLI members. Recipients were invited to forward the link to other qualified school librarians; one participant referred three additional librarians. Because the invitation could be redistributed, the number of people who ultimately received or viewed the invitation is unknown, and a conventional response rate is not reported.
Recruitment combined purposive and referral sampling. Membership in a professional association provided an initial frame of practicing school librarians, while referrals extended recruitment beyond the original contact list. Participation was voluntary and non-probability based. The resulting survey sample should not be interpreted as statistically representative of PASLI members or of all Philippine school librarians.
Thirty-three librarians submitted complete survey records between November 20 and December 11, 2025. Fourteen were aged 20–29 years, nine were 30–39, five were 40–49, four were 50–59, and one was aged 60 or older. Twenty-nine identified as women and four as men. Fifteen reported up to five years of school-library experience, eight reported 6–10 years, six reported 11–15 years, and four reported more than 20 years.
At the end of the survey, respondents could separately provide contact details if they were willing to join a follow-up interview or focus-group discussion. Seven expressed interest, and five completed individual interviews. This volunteer subsample included librarians serving kindergarten, elementary, secondary, and combined school populations. Their platform positions were heterogeneous: the group included non-users, personal users of commercial reading platforms, prospective institutional adopters, and librarians whose schools already used subscription or educational reading services. This variation was analytically important because it prevented the study from treating all participants as uniformly “pre-adoption.”
Data sources and fieldwork
Table 2 summarizes the three empirical components and their roles in the revised design. The pilot informed instrument refinement but was not pooled with the main survey. The interviews are the primary interpretive dataset, while the main survey provides descriptive and sensitivity evidence.
| Component | Participants or records | Timing and mode | Role in this article |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instrument pilot | 8 librarians; 4 also interviewed | Before main data collection; online survey and feedback interviews | Item refinement; excluded from main analysis |
| Main survey | 33 complete responses | November 20–December 11, 2025; Google Forms | Exploratory description, reliability assessment, and sensitivity analysis |
| Semistructured interviews | 5 survey volunteers | December 2–11, 2025; Google Meet | Primary evidence for organizational-readiness themes |
Survey
The final questionnaire contained demographic and familiarity questions followed by 27 four-point Likert items. Response options ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). An even-numbered scale was selected in the original study to require a directional response, although this choice also removes a neutral option and must be considered when interpreting central tendency.
The items operationalized seven constructs: performance expectancy (four items), effort expectancy (five), social influence (four), facilitating conditions (five), behavioral intention (four), hedonic motivation (three), and price value (two). Items were adapted to the school-library and digital-reading context from UTAUT and UTAUT2 (Venkatesh et al. 2003, 2012). Habit was omitted because the original instrument assumed prospective adoption. The interviews later showed that this assumption did not hold across the sample; accordingly, the present article does not interpret the behavioral-intention items as a pure pre-adoption measure.
The survey’s opening page described participation and data-privacy conditions. All 33 retained respondents selected the affirmative consent option. Names, email addresses, and mobile numbers were requested only through optional interview-volunteer fields. Analyses use the de-identified Raw Data worksheet, which contains respondent codes, demographics, familiarity, and item responses but not those direct contact fields.
Instrument pilot
Eight librarians completed the pilot questionnaire, and four participated in follow-up discussions about the instrument. Pilot responses and feedback informed wording and redundancy decisions. Comparison of the pilot and final instruments shows that one performance-expectancy item concerning motivation to read regularly and one price item concerning reasonable pricing were removed. Wording concerning library-system compatibility and financial support was also refined. Pilot cases were kept separate from the 33 main-study records.
The main-study workbook contains a duplicated short label for the two price-value indicators (PV 1 and PV 1.1). The second variable is treated as PV 2 in the analysis code and documentation. This correction changes only the variable name; it does not alter any response.
Interviews
The five individual interviews were conducted online through Google Meet on December 2, 5, 7, 10, and 11, 2025. They lasted 19 minutes 12 seconds to 40 minutes 45 seconds and totaled 152 minutes 29 seconds. The first author used a semistructured guide initially organized around the six UTAUT2 predictor domains. Questions invited participants to discuss perceived benefits and difficulties, teacher and administrator views, parent expectations, resources and technical support, platform–system compatibility, enjoyment, cost, and anticipated future use. Follow-up questions probed concrete institutional experiences, including subscription renewal, curricular integration, device scheduling, content filtering, and approval processes.
Interviews moved between English and Filipino according to participant preference. Audio was transcribed and participants were assigned the identifiers SL-1 through SL-5. School and personal names were removed from the working transcripts used for the article. Quotations are presented in their original English where applicable; Filipino passages selected for publication are accompanied by English translations.
Data preparation and response-quality assessment
The reproducible workflow is written in R within this Quarto document. Data import and transformation use readxl, dplyr, tidyr, purrr, stringr, and janitor; reliability estimates use psych; exploratory resampling uses boot; regression summaries use broom, sandwich, and lmtest; and sensitivity calculations use pwr. Package and system versions can be recorded without an additional dependency using utils::sessionInfo().
Quality screening was specified to detect missing or out-of-range item values, duplicate response vectors, and low within-person variation. All 33 cases contained responses to all 27 items, and all item values fell within the intended 1–4 range. No exact duplicate 27-item response vectors were present. One respondent selected the maximum response for every item, producing zero within-person variance across the full battery. Straightlining is a useful flag but not a definitive diagnosis of invalid responding, and no universal indicator or threshold exists (Kim et al. 2019). The case was therefore retained in the primary descriptive analysis and excluded only in a documented sensitivity analysis. Conclusions that change materially under that exclusion are identified.
Because Google Forms recorded submission timestamps but not survey start times, completion speed could not be evaluated. The available data also do not support device, IP-address, or repeated-participation checks. These unavailable diagnostics are reported rather than inferred.
Quantitative analysis
The quantitative analysis is intentionally estimation-focused and exploratory. Item distributions are summarized using counts and percentages. For each construct, the article reports the mean, standard deviation, median, interquartile range, and observed range. Construct scores are calculated as the unweighted mean of their constituent items; all records are complete, so no item-level imputation is performed. Internal consistency is summarized with Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega; percentile-bootstrap confidence intervals are reported for alpha. For the two-item price-value scale, the inter-item correlation and Spearman–Brown coefficient are reported instead of omega. Reliability is interpreted cautiously because high internal consistency does not establish construct validity or support a structural relationship, and alpha in particular depends on restrictive assumptions that are often left unexamined (Zakariya 2022).
The original thesis fitted a PLS-SEM model in which performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, and price value simultaneously predicted behavioral intention. That specification is not used for confirmatory hypothesis testing in this article. PLS does not remove the relationship between sample size, statistical power, and estimate instability (Henseler et al. 2014; Kock and Hadaya 2018). With only 33 observations for six correlated predictors, path estimates are expected to be imprecise.
For transparency and comparability with the thesis, standardized construct-score associations and the six-predictor regression are retained as sensitivity analyses. The article reports standardized coefficients and 95% nonparametric bootstrap confidence intervals using 10,000 resamples and a fixed random seed (20260725). Heteroskedasticity-consistent HC3 standard errors are also calculated. Coefficients are described as exploratory directional estimates; the language of “supported hypotheses,” “significant motivators,” causal “influence,” and “predictive power” is not used. The in-sample (R^2) is reported as model fit to these observations, not evidence of out-of-sample prediction.
A sensitivity analysis repeats the descriptive and construct-score regression results after excluding the full-battery straightline case. A fixed-(N) power sensitivity calculation reports the minimum effect size detectable with 80% power for six predictors at (). This calculation characterizes what the available sample could reasonably detect; it does not retrospectively validate the sample size.
Qualitative analysis
The transcripts were reanalyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006, 2021). This approach was selected because the study seeks patterned meanings across participants while recognizing that themes are interpretive products developed through engagement with the data. Its use within the mixed-method design also follows guidance that qualitative thematic analysis should be planned and interpreted in relation to the study’s integration purposes rather than treated as an isolated analytic stream (DeJonckheere et al. 2024). Analysis followed six recursive phases: familiarization; initial coding; construction of candidate themes; review against coded extracts and complete transcripts; definition and naming; and analytic writing.
The reanalysis combined inductive and theoretically sensitized coding. UTAUT2 informed attention to usefulness, effort, social expectations, resources, enjoyment, and cost, but codes were not required to fit those categories. Passages concerning procurement, accreditation, professional authority, parent approval, device allocation, systems integration, vendor support, content suitability, filtering, moderation, privacy, and instructional coordination were coded on their own terms. This procedure directly addressed the risk of forcing organizational and ethical concerns into individual-acceptance constructs.
Theme development used the four readiness domains established in the conceptual framework as provisional organizing concepts rather than predetermined findings: institutional authorization; reader engagement and instructional value; implementation capacity; and content governance and child protection. Candidate themes were retained only when they captured a coherent pattern supported across the dataset or represented a consequential divergent case. Particular attention was paid to differences between personal and institutional use, prospective and existing adoption, free and subscription services, and open user-generated-content platforms and curated educational services.
Reflexive thematic analysis does not treat coding agreement as the criterion of analytic quality (Braun and Clarke 2021). The analytic process instead emphasized a documented decision trail, repeated comparison with complete transcripts, attention to counterexamples, precise separation of participant claims from study conclusions, and quotations that show the evidentiary basis of each interpretation. The qualitative reporting was structured with reference to COREQ to make interviewer characteristics, recruitment, fieldwork, analysis, and quotation practices visible (Tong et al. 2007).
Mixed-method integration
Integration occurs at four points. First, the survey and interview instruments share UTAUT2-derived domains, creating conceptual linkage at data collection. Second, interview participants were connected from the survey volunteer pool. Third, quantitative patterns and qualitative themes are merged in a joint display rather than discussed in isolated sections. Fourth, meta-inferences are developed by examining convergence, complementarity, expansion, and dissonance across strands (Fetters et al. 2013; DeJonckheere et al. 2024).
The integration procedure does not use interview quotations to “confirm” unstable coefficients. Instead, survey estimates indicate how the 33 respondents distributed their evaluations, while interviews explain how similar evaluations can operate differently within institutional contexts. For example, a positive evaluation of enjoyment may converge with accounts of student engagement but be qualified by content-governance concerns. A weak construct-level association for facilitating conditions may coexist with extensive interview evidence that devices and staffing function as threshold constraints. The organizational-readiness framework supplies the common analytic structure without erasing these differences.
Researcher positioning and reflexivity
At the time of data collection, the first author was a Bachelor of Library and Information Science student conducting an undergraduate thesis; the second author was the thesis adviser. Their LIS training supported familiarity with collection development, school-library practice, and technology-adoption literature, but it also created a risk of presuming that technological expansion is inherently progressive. The journal reanalysis deliberately challenged that assumption by distinguishing access from learning outcomes, personal acceptance from institutional readiness, and innovation advocacy from professional responsibilities for curation and child protection.
The interviewer’s status as an emerging LIS professional may have reduced professional distance and encouraged detailed accounts, while differences in experience and institutional position may also have shaped what participants chose to disclose. Reflexive notes and analytic memos were used to identify moments when interpretations depended on prior commitments to UTAUT2, digital modernization, or the presumed benefits of short-form reading.
Ethics, privacy, and transparency
The survey required affirmative informed consent and referred participants to the Philippine Data Privacy Act of 2012. Optional contact details were collected only from respondents volunteering for follow-up. Analysis files excluded direct survey contact fields, and interview reports use participant codes and redact school and personal names.
Author information required before submission: the available study files do not document the name of the research-ethics body, approval or exemption number and date, separate recording-consent procedure, withdrawal arrangements, data-retention period, storage safeguards, or the process used to verify Filipino-to-English translations. These details must be supplied from the original study records; they must not be reconstructed from assumption.
Because the raw survey export contains optional names and contact details and the interview narratives may permit deductive identification of schools, unrestricted public release would be inappropriate. A de-identified item-level dataset, analysis script, codebook, and carefully reviewed quotation file should be deposited in a controlled repository if permitted by the original consent and ethics determination. The Quarto source records every reported quantitative transformation, table, and figure, and a rendered session-information appendix will record R and package versions. Repository DOI and access conditions will be inserted before submission.
Results
Sample composition and platform familiarity
The 33 survey respondents represented several career stages but were concentrated among women (29, 87.9%) and librarians with no more than five years of school-library experience (15, 45.5%). Fourteen respondents (42.4%) were aged 20–29 years. The five interview participants nevertheless supplied purposeful variation that the survey profile alone could not provide: they worked across kindergarten, elementary, junior-high, and senior-high settings and included a non-user, personal users, prospective institutional adopters, and librarians responsible for established school subscriptions. The Results therefore use the survey to characterize the response pattern and the interviews to examine how platform judgments were translated—or failed to translate—into institutional action.
As Figure 2 shows, familiarity was anchored in open or commercial serial-fiction environments: 28 respondents named Wattpad (84.8%), 18 named Webnovel (54.5%), and 12 named Kindle Singles (36.4%). PressReader and Tapas Novels were each named by two respondents, while World Book Online and a generic category of free reading sites were each named once. These responses do not measure use frequency or institutional deployment. They instead show that respondents entered the questionnaire with uneven referents: some were evaluating open user-generated-fiction platforms, while others were drawing on curated newspaper, reference, or school-reading services. The interview analysis retained this heterogeneity rather than assuming that “digital short-form and serialized reading platform” denoted one stable product class.
Survey response pattern and measurement quality
All 33 cases contained all 27 item responses, and every response fell within the intended 1–4 range. There were no duplicate 27-item response vectors. One respondent selected the maximum category for every item; retaining or excluding that record did not materially alter any standardized regression coefficient (largest absolute change = .007). The case was consequently retained in the primary results.
| Construct | Items | Mean (SD) | Median [IQR] | Observed range | Alpha [95% CI] | Omega or SB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance expectancy | 4 | 3.27 (0.51) | 3.25 [3.00, 3.75] | 2.25–4.00 | 0.71 [0.51, 0.83] | 0.76 (omega) |
| Effort expectancy | 5 | 3.20 (0.68) | 3.00 [3.00, 3.80] | 1.00–4.00 | 0.96 [0.91, 0.98] | 0.96 (omega) |
| Social influence | 4 | 2.92 (0.58) | 3.00 [2.50, 3.25] | 1.50–4.00 | 0.83 [0.66, 0.91] | 0.83 (omega) |
| Facilitating conditions | 5 | 2.87 (0.63) | 3.00 [2.40, 3.20] | 1.00–4.00 | 0.86 [0.70, 0.93] | 0.86 (omega) |
| Behavioral intention | 4 | 2.98 (0.65) | 3.00 [2.75, 3.25] | 1.00–4.00 | 0.92 [0.82, 0.96] | 0.92 (omega) |
| Hedonic motivation | 3 | 3.39 (0.58) | 3.00 [3.00, 4.00] | 1.67–4.00 | 0.95 [0.86, 1.00] | 0.95 (omega) |
| Price value | 2 | 3.03 (0.59) | 3.00 [3.00, 3.50] | 2.00–4.00 | 0.82 [0.61, 0.93] | 0.82 (SB) |
Table 3 shows generally favorable evaluations, but not uniformly maximal ones. Hedonic motivation had the highest mean ((M=3.39), (SD=0.58)), followed by performance expectancy ((M=3.27), (SD=0.51)) and effort expectancy ((M=3.20), (SD=0.68)). Facilitating conditions had the lowest mean ((M=2.87), (SD=0.63)), closely followed by social influence ((M=2.92), (SD=0.58)). Behavioral intention was near the favorable side of the midpoint ((M=2.98), (SD=0.65)). This ordering suggests that the respondents found the platforms attractive and potentially useful more readily than they judged their organizational environments to be enabling.
Internal-consistency estimates ranged from () for performance expectancy to () for effort expectancy. Omega estimates for scales with at least three items ranged from .76 to .96. The two price-value items correlated at (r=.69), yielding a Spearman–Brown coefficient of .82. The comparatively wide bootstrap interval for performance-expectancy alpha [.51, .83] and the small sample require restraint. Moreover, the very high coefficients for effort expectancy, behavioral intention, and hedonic motivation may reflect closely worded items as well as coherence. These estimates support forming exploratory composite scores; they do not establish discriminant validity or validate a seven-construct measurement model.
Exploratory associations with behavioral intention
The six-predictor standardized regression fitted the observed data well in-sample ((R^2=.693), adjusted (R^2=.623)), but the coefficient estimates were highly uncertain. With (N=33), six predictors, (), and 80% power, the fixed-sample sensitivity calculation indicated a minimum detectable (f^2=.52), equivalent to approximately (R^2=.34) for a six-predictor model tested against a null model. Thus, the available sample was equipped to detect only a large omnibus signal and was not suited to distinguish the partial contribution of correlated predictors.
| Predictor | Standardized beta | HC3 SE | HC3 p | Bootstrap 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance expectancy | -0.131 | 0.163 | 0.429 | [-0.432, 0.231] |
| Effort expectancy | 0.263 | 0.236 | 0.274 | [-0.145, 0.538] |
| Social influence | 0.315 | 0.252 | 0.222 | [-0.141, 0.693] |
| Facilitating conditions | 0.048 | 0.359 | 0.895 | [-0.507, 0.602] |
| Hedonic motivation | 0.306 | 0.280 | 0.284 | [-0.157, 0.681] |
| Price value | 0.273 | 0.221 | 0.229 | [-0.028, 0.741] |
Table 4 provides the exact estimates, while Figure 3 makes their uncertainty visible. Social influence had the largest positive point estimate ((), 95% bootstrap CI [(-.141,.693)]), followed by hedonic motivation ((), [(-.157,.681)]), price value ((), [(-.028,.741)]), and effort expectancy ((), [(-.145,.538)]). Facilitating conditions was close to zero ((), [(-.507,.602)]), and performance expectancy was negative after adjustment ((), [(-.432,.231)]). Every interval crossed zero, and all HC3 (p)-values exceeded .22. Excluding the straightline record produced nearly identical coefficients and reduced (R^2) from .693 to .667.
The negative adjusted coefficient for performance expectancy should not be read as evidence that perceived usefulness suppresses intention. Its zero-order correlation with behavioral intention was positive ((r=.54)); the sign reversal appeared only when the six correlated scores were entered simultaneously. The appropriate inference is that this sample cannot separate their partial associations with adequate precision. The regression therefore supplies a map of plausible directions, not a ranking of “drivers” and not a basis for accepting or rejecting UTAUT2 hypotheses.
Organizational readiness themes
Instructional value depended on orchestration
Participants consistently separated platform affordances from educational outcomes. Short texts, multilingual collections, portability, multimedia, and frequent updates could attract readers, but the accounts did not support a simple sequence from access to engagement to comprehension. SL-2 contrasted unstructured and structured device use. During open lunch periods, children assigned iPads for Epic, Scholastic, or PressReader moved to YouTube: “I cannot control that, since I am a one-person librarian” (English translation). The same services became educationally productive when an English teacher brought a class to the library and assigned a defined task.
SL-4 described a stronger institutional arrangement: Scholastic use was embedded in the curriculum, and the school tracked reading level, books completed, and quizzes passed. SL-1 likewise framed integration through library instruction coordinated with English teachers, including activities on story genres. These cases distinguish an engaging interface from an instructional program. Enjoyment was a valued entry point, particularly for reluctant readers and students drawn to video or short episodes, but observed benefit depended on scheduling, task design, teacher collaboration, guidance, and outcome monitoring.
This theme also contained dissonance. SL-1 anticipated that digital access could reduce physical visits unless the library supplied devices or connected digital reading to print collections. SL-4, by contrast, expected the school’s online reading hub to draw students into the library even when they were not using print books. “Library use” therefore changed meaning across settings: it could denote entry into a physical space, access to a licensed resource, participation in a class activity, or sustained reading. Readiness requires schools to specify which outcome they intend to improve.
Capacity was an interdependent service configuration
Implementation capacity was not reducible to whether an application was easy to navigate. Participants frequently described students as capable digital users, yet identified failures elsewhere in the service configuration: too few devices for a full class, interrupted internet, short class periods, difficult credential management, non-web-based library systems, incompatible platforms, limited technical support, and one-person staffing.
SL-4’s school had fewer computers than students in a section and initially lost substantial time helping younger pupils log in. By the third year, peer helpers supported navigation, demonstrating that capacity could be built through workflow redesign rather than technology purchase alone. SL-5 had limited device funding and no dedicated information-technology staff in the elementary department; assistance had to come from the university unit. SL-1 considered institutional access infeasible without school-provided compatible devices and a web-based system. SL-3 judged basic integration possible but anticipated difficulty maintaining a platform during glitches because not all librarians were prepared for technical support.
SL-2’s account showed the workload implications most sharply. A one-person librarian managed several subscriptions, credentials, orientations, reporting, teacher assistance, vendor communication, and discovery of new resources. Free services were attractive only when they remained supportable: “even if it is free, we will take it, as long as we can manage it” (English translation). The operative constraint was therefore not simply resource possession but the alignment of staffing, support, systems, schedules, and scale.
Content governance conditioned acceptability and value
Every interview raised age suitability, screen time, filtering, guided use, or content control. The concern was most acute when participants moved from personal use of Wattpad or Webnovel to possible school use. SL-1 valued their genre and language diversity but questioned whether children could access mature content and whether age restrictions existed. SL-4 recommended Wattpad for some high-school leisure reading but not for elementary pupils. SL-3 stated that a paid platform would become more attractive if purchase enabled the library to filter what students could access. These concerns parallel evidence from other child-used recommendation environments showing that platform design can shape exposure beyond the materials an adult initially selects (Radesky et al. 2024).
These accounts show that governance was not an afterthought applied after a usefulness decision. It altered the meaning of usefulness and price. SL-1 explained that school-library evaluation criteria required materials to suit children’s reading levels and avoid mature content because parents, teachers, and librarians could not monitor every reading encounter. SL-3 regarded a vendor-curated age structure as potentially labor-saving. A subscription’s value could therefore reside in professional controls, metadata, and administrative assurance rather than content volume alone.
Screen time complicated the issue further. Parents could favor home access while objecting to prolonged device use, and pupils could invoke a reading application while switching to unrelated media. Participants did not advocate either unrestricted access or blanket prohibition. Their accounts supported supervised, age-differentiated, purpose-specific access—a governance capacity absent from the survey’s acceptance constructs.
Integrated findings: acceptance without readiness
The statistics-by-themes joint display in Table 5 integrates the strands by treating convergence, complementarity, and dissonance as sources of meta-inference rather than using one dataset to validate the other. Joint displays are particularly useful when the analytic objective is to generate inferences unavailable from parallel quantitative and qualitative summaries (Guetterman et al. 2015; Peters and Fàbregues 2024).
| Readiness domain | Survey pattern | Interview evidence | Meta-inference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Institutional authorization | SI M = 2.92; beta = .315, 95% CI [-.141, .693] | Approval, payment, curricular endorsement, evidence of use, and renewal were distributed across librarians, leaders, teachers, and parents | Perceived approval cannot represent decision rights or the repeated work of authorization |
| Reader engagement and instructional value | HM was highest (M = 3.39); PE M = 3.27; both adjusted intervals crossed zero | Benefits appeared under structured tasks, collaboration, guidance, and monitoring; unstructured access could shift to unrelated media | Enjoyment and expected usefulness are potential resources; instructional orchestration converts them into educational value |
| Implementation capacity | FC was lowest (M = 2.87); beta = .048, 95% CI [-.507, .602] | Devices, connectivity, credentials, systems, staffing, vendor support, and time operated as an interdependent configuration | Capacity behaves as a threshold and scaling condition, not necessarily as a linear motivational predictor |
| Content governance and child protection | No construct directly measured curation, age controls, privacy, or moderation | All five participants raised age suitability, filtering, screen time, guided use, or content control | Governance is a constitutive readiness domain that changes whether access and price are acceptable |
Table 5 reveals a consistent pattern across strands: respondents were broadly receptive to digital reading, but readiness was conditional. The high hedonic-motivation mean converged with interview expectations that short, serial, and multimedia formats could engage students. Interviews qualified that convergence by showing that engagement became instructionally meaningful only through structured use. The low facilitating-conditions mean converged with accounts of device, connectivity, staffing, and interoperability constraints; the near-zero partial coefficient did not negate those accounts because capacity often operated as a threshold that had to be crossed before intention could become action.
The strongest expansion concerned authorization and governance. Social influence registered moderate favorable sentiment, yet the interviews exposed formal decision rights, budget cycles, evidence requirements, and leadership succession that the construct did not measure. Content governance had no direct survey representation at all, despite appearing across every interview and changing participants’ judgments of usefulness, cost, and feasibility. The integrated finding is consequently not that acceptance constructs are irrelevant. Rather, acceptance constitutes one layer within an organizational readiness configuration. A librarian can perceive a platform as enjoyable, useful, easy, and worth its price while the school remains unready because authorization is incomplete, instructional use is unspecified, implementation capacity is misaligned, or content governance is inadequate.
Discussion
Favorable acceptance did not amount to organizational readiness
This study asked what becomes visible when school librarians’ evaluations of digital short-form and serialized reading platforms are treated as one component of an organizational decision rather than as a proxy for adoption readiness. The answer is a consequential gap between acceptability and readiness. Respondents generally evaluated the platforms favorably, particularly in relation to enjoyment, usefulness, and ease. Yet the interviews showed that institutional integration depended on conditions that an individual acceptance model could only partially represent: who possessed authority to approve and renew a service; whether the school had specified an instructional use; whether staff, devices, systems, and support could sustain that use; and whether the platform permitted responsible governance of children’s access.
The quantitative results should be interpreted in that light. The relatively high construct means in Table 3 establish receptivity within this non-probability sample, not organizational preparedness. Likewise, the large in-sample (R^2) did not yield stable partial effects. Every interval in Figure 3 included zero, and the fixed-(N) sensitivity analysis showed that only a large omnibus effect was detectable. It would therefore be methodologically indefensible to convert the coefficient ordering into a hierarchy of interventions—for example, by recommending that schools increase social influence or hedonic motivation because those point estimates were largest. The more defensible contribution is the integrated explanation of why favorable individual evaluations can coexist with institutional hesitation, limited implementation, or discontinuation.
This distinction also resolves an apparent tension in the findings. Facilitating conditions had the lowest construct mean but a near-zero adjusted coefficient. If facilitating conditions are treated only as a motivational predictor of intention, that coefficient may make capacity appear unimportant. The interviews instead showed that capacity often behaved as a threshold. A librarian could intend to use a platform, and pupils could find it easy and enjoyable, while the service remained impossible to deliver to a full class because devices, credentials, connectivity, staffing, or system compatibility were insufficient. Once a minimum configuration was present, additional perceived capacity might contribute little to intention even though the threshold remained decisive for implementation. Cross-sectional acceptance coefficients are poorly suited to representing such conjunctural and stage-dependent relationships.
From independent acceptance predictors to a readiness configuration
The study makes three theoretical moves beyond technology acceptance. First, it separates levels of analysis. UTAUT2 constructs describe an individual’s evaluation and intended behavior (Venkatesh et al. 2012). Organizational readiness, by contrast, concerns shared commitment and shared confidence in collective implementation capability Weiner (2009). The distinction is not semantic. Evidence from one librarian—even a head librarian—cannot establish that administrators, teachers, technical staff, parents, and other organizational members share a resolve or believe collectively that the school can execute the change. It can establish the librarian’s informed assessment of the conditions under which collective action is likely.
This level distinction has implications for measurement. Readiness research differentiates change commitment and change efficacy from their determinants and requires evidence of within-organization agreement before individual reports are aggregated as an organizational property (Shea et al. 2014). The present survey was not designed to meet those requirements. Relabeling its UTAUT2 composites as “organizational readiness” would reproduce the very category error this article seeks to correct. The four-domain framework should instead be understood as an analytical and diagnostic structure derived from the interview evidence and relevant theory. It identifies what must be investigated before a school-level readiness claim can be warranted; it is not yet a validated readiness scale.
Second, the findings shift the unit of explanation from independent predictors to a configuration. Authorization, instructional value, implementation capacity, and content governance interacted. A curated subscription could cost more yet be easier to authorize because it offered age controls, vendor support, usage evidence, and curricular materials. A free platform could score well on enjoyment and ease yet impose unsustainable curation and monitoring work. A technically accessible service could remain educationally weak without teacher collaboration, while a resource with demonstrated instructional value could still fail at renewal when leadership or budget priorities changed. Readiness was therefore not the sum of four independent domain scores. It was the adequacy and alignment of the domains for a specified platform, population, use case, scale, and implementation stage.
Third, the study adds temporal specificity. Readiness was repeatedly reassessed as a service moved from consideration to pilot, routine use, evaluation, and renewal. SL-2’s experience across two administrations demonstrated that prior adoption did not settle future authorization; evidence of utilization and comparative value had to be reconstructed. SL-3’s “not now” position showed that a school can regard an innovation as beneficial but give precedence to restoration of core services. These findings support treating readiness as a dynamic state rather than a permanent organizational attribute (Weiner 2009). They also suggest that renewal readiness deserves analytic attention distinct from adoption readiness because the evidentiary burden changes after implementation.
Platform type changed the readiness problem
The broad label used in the original survey concealed materially different sociotechnical arrangements. Wattpad and Webnovel foreground serial fiction, user participation, open discovery, and continuously changing catalogues. PressReader, Scholastic, Epic, and World Book offer different combinations of licensed content, curricular structure, administrative accounts, reporting, and vendor support. Respondents’ familiarity was concentrated in the first group, while the strongest examples of sustained institutional use came from the second. The distinction matters because readiness attaches not to “digital reading” in the abstract but to a particular platform architecture and institutional use.
Open participatory platforms can offer vernacular writing, multilingual materials, visible audiences, and pathways from reading to authorship (Korobkova and Collins 2019). These features help explain the favorable hedonic and performance expectations. They also transfer substantial selection and governance work to the school. Content is continuously added, recommendation systems can move readers beyond materials initially selected by a librarian, and social features may expose students to interaction, commercial influence, or disclosure risks. Research on child-used recommendation systems demonstrates why exposure pathways—not only the nominal catalogue—belong in institutional review (Radesky et al. 2024). A conventional title-by-title collection-development decision is therefore insufficient. The school is deciding whether to admit a changing discovery, recommendation, and participation environment into its educational infrastructure.
Curated educational and subscription services do not eliminate these questions, but they can redistribute the work. Age bands, administrative controls, usage reports, technical support, and stable licensing can make professional oversight more feasible. The interviews accordingly reframed price value: payment was not merely the cost of acquiring content but could purchase governance and implementation capacity. Conversely, a paid service still required scrutiny of its recommendation logic, data practices, accessibility, renewal terms, and curricular claims.
The prominence of content governance in all five interviews is particularly significant because no survey construct measured it directly. Contemporary child-development guidance treats digital platforms as ecosystems whose business models, recommendations, autoplay, social metrics, advertising, and data collection shape children’s experiences; it consequently emphasizes safety and privacy by default rather than relying solely on families to monitor use (Munzer et al. 2026). School libraries require an analogous institutional stance. Librarians should not be expected to compensate through constant supervision for platform designs that do not provide age-appropriate defaults, usable moderation, transparent recommendations, privacy protection, and meaningful administrative control.
The results also caution against equating digital engagement with reading achievement. Participants supplied plausible mechanisms—lower entry barriers, short episodes, multimedia alternatives, portability, and frequent updates—but the study measured neither students’ reading behavior nor comprehension. Prior syntheses have found a small average comprehension advantage for paper under several reading conditions, while documenting variation by time pressure, text type, study design, and context (Delgado et al. 2018; Clinton-Lisell 2019). That literature does not justify rejecting digital reading, especially when a platform enables access or participation that print cannot. It does require schools to identify the intended outcome and evaluate it directly rather than treating time on platform, logins, titles opened, or expressed enjoyment as interchangeable with learning.
School librarians as boundary-spanning implementation leaders
The interviews portray school librarians as boundary spanners among collection development, curriculum, technology, administration, and families. They identified resources, evaluated content, created accounts, oriented users, coordinated with teachers, scheduled devices, communicated with vendors, troubleshot access, assembled usage evidence, and defended renewal. This work extended well beyond personal technology use. It was the connective labor through which a platform became—or failed to become—an institutional service.
That labor was often structurally fragile. Several participants worked as one-person librarians, and their capacity depended on informal learning, professional associations, supportive colleagues, or distant information-technology units. An adoption decision could therefore add responsibilities without adding authority, time, or staffing. Positioning the librarian as a “technology champion” is inadequate when championing becomes a substitute for an implementation structure. Readiness requires explicit ownership of procurement, instructional design, technical escalation, user support, governance, evaluation, and renewal.
The findings complement research showing that school librarians contribute most effectively to technology initiatives when leaders incorporate the library into the institutional vision, develop librarians’ professional capacity, engage them in curriculum and instruction, and use their expertise in digital-resource decisions (Baker 2016; Moen 2025). Evidence linking principals’ technology leadership and professional development with classroom technology integration further supports treating leadership and learning opportunities as implementation conditions rather than background variables (Thannimalai and Raman 2018). The present findings also sharpen that argument. Inclusion is not only recognition of professional status; it is a risk-control and implementation mechanism. Early librarian involvement can expose mismatches among platform affordances, learner needs, collection policy, technical infrastructure, and instructional routines before the school enters a contract or launches a service.
At the same time, librarians cannot supply organizational readiness alone. The approval chains described by SL-3 and SL-4 and the renewal conflict described by SL-2 demonstrate the need for distributed leadership. Administrators control priorities and resources; teachers convert access into recurring instructional practice; technical staff sustain infrastructure; parents influence legitimacy and home use; and students reveal whether the designed service is meaningful in practice. The librarian’s distinctive contribution is to connect these perspectives through professional judgment about information access, reading, curation, and intellectual freedom—not to absorb every implementation task.
Implications for institutional decision-making
The four readiness domains can be used as a staged decision protocol. Before a pilot, a school should define the reader group, instructional or library-service purpose, platform type, responsible decision makers, minimum safeguards, and bounded scale. The relevant question is not “Are we ready to adopt digital reading?” but, for example, “Are we ready to pilot this curated service with two Grade 5 classes for guided independent reading during one term?”
Authorization should specify who recommends, approves, pays, communicates with families, evaluates, and decides on continuation. A platform should not advance merely because a librarian or administrator is enthusiastic. Nor should stakeholder consultation collapse into a vote in which all views are treated as carrying the same responsibility. Decision rights, expertise, exposure to risk, and accountability need to be explicit.
Instructional-value planning should articulate the mechanism connecting platform use to the intended outcome. If the purpose is voluntary reading, relevant evidence may include sustained choice, return use, reading diversity, and student accounts of engagement. If the purpose is comprehension, the design requires appropriate performance measures rather than usage analytics alone. If the purpose is access, evaluation should examine who can actually use the service across devices, locations, languages, and accessibility needs. SL-2’s contrast between open iPad use and teacher-structured activity shows why the activity system—not the platform in isolation—must be evaluated.
Capacity assessment should estimate the recurring work per class, user, and reporting cycle. A small pilot can reveal login time, support requests, bandwidth failures, device bottlenecks, teacher preparation, curation effort, and vendor responsiveness. These demands should be assigned to named roles and compared with available workload, not hidden under a generic statement that technical support exists. Scaling should be conditional on evidence that the service remains operable without relying on exceptional unpaid labor or a single knowledgeable person.
Governance review should occur before procurement and again when platform functions or policies change. At minimum, schools should examine age eligibility, content classification, discovery and recommendation pathways, user-generated content, social interaction, advertising and commercialization, data collection and retention, parental communication, accessibility, reporting mechanisms, account deletion, and exit or data-export arrangements. The appropriate response may differ by age group and use case. A platform unsuitable for unsupervised elementary access could still support a mediated high-school activity; readiness conclusions should state those boundaries.
Finally, renewal should be designed at adoption. Schools should agree in advance on the evidence, review date, responsible reviewers, acceptable cost, safeguarding incidents, workload, and exit criteria that will inform continuation. This converts the defensive reconstruction described by SL-2 into routine organizational learning. It also protects libraries from maintaining underused services solely because cancellation is politically difficult or abandoning valuable services because their benefits were never documented.
Limitations and directions for research
The study’s conclusions are analytically transferable rather than statistically generalizable. The survey used purposive and referral recruitment through a professional association, the invitation could be redistributed, and no defensible response rate can be calculated. The sample of 33 was too small for confirmatory structural modeling or stable six-predictor inference. Its age, gender, and experience composition may not represent Philippine school librarians nationally. The sensitivity analyses clarify estimate instability; they do not repair the sampling limitations.
The four-point response format forced directional choices and may have elevated apparent favorability by removing a neutral option. All acceptance constructs and behavioral intention came from the same respondent at one time, creating shared-method and consistency pressures. Some item sets produced very high reliability estimates that could indicate redundancy rather than broad construct coverage; internal consistency alone is not evidence of validity, and alpha may be misleading when its assumptions are not met (Zakariya 2022). Price value had only two items. The study did not establish measurement invariance, discriminant validity, or predictive validity, and the corrected duplicate price-value label underscores the importance of maintaining a prospective data dictionary.
The qualitative strand was information-rich but small and self-selected. Five survey volunteers may have been more interested in digital platforms or more confident discussing them than non-volunteers. The interview guide was initially organized by UTAUT2 and may have foregrounded acceptance concepts even though the reanalysis coded beyond them. Interviews were conducted by the first author, and some passages moved between Filipino and English. Translation choices, professional proximity, and retrospective interpretation may have shaped the resulting account. The analysis also relied principally on librarian reports. It did not independently verify budgets, contracts, platform settings, usage reports, content incidents, or school policies.
Most importantly, the study did not collect organizationally distributed readiness data. Administrators, teachers, technical staff, parents, and students were discussed but not interviewed, and the participating librarians generally represented different schools. The analysis can therefore identify readiness conditions and professional assessments but cannot estimate within-school consensus, collective efficacy, or causal relationships between readiness and implementation outcomes. Similarly, existing use of PressReader, Scholastic, and Epic was described but not observed longitudinally.
Future research should use a comparative, multilevel design in which several members of the same school evaluate a clearly specified platform and use case. Readiness measures grounded in change commitment and change efficacy could be paired with the four diagnostic domains, but only after content validation with school-library stakeholders and testing of agreement within schools (Shea et al. 2014). Comparative cases should distinguish open user-generated platforms, curated educational services, news and magazine aggregators, and library e-book systems rather than treating them as equivalent.
Longitudinal research could follow schools from consideration through pilot, implementation, routine use, renewal, or abandonment. Such designs would clarify which readiness configurations predict initiation, implementation fidelity, sustained use, equitable access, workload, governance incidents, and educational outcomes. Student-centered studies should separately measure enjoyment, voluntary reading, comprehension, writing participation, and displacement of other reading practices. Finally, research in the Philippine context should examine how school type, library staffing, connectivity, procurement rules, accreditation, language, and family payment arrangements shape readiness. These studies would permit the present framework to be refined, challenged, and eventually tested without reducing organizational change to an individual intention score.
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