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Library websites being the virtual or digital facet of any library it is paramount to constantly evaluate and enhance the interface with necessary resources and services. In this regard, this study was carried out to analyze a range of opinions and feedbacks from stakeholders of a university library, which has published the links to subscribed databases, training guides, reference services, and research support services on its website. Due to the restrictions on mobility by economic crisis and Corona pandemic, library users heavily relied on digital interfaces to share and retrieve information. In this regard, a survey was carried out to explore the demand and desire of the library users as whether the library website satisfies them or does it need redesigning. Convenient sampling technique was employed where hundred and fifteen (115) users had responded to semi-structured questionnaires. Data extracted were analyzed using the Pearson Chi-square test, one-way ANOVA, and one sample Wilcoxon sign rank test. Majority (33.3%) of the students of the Faculty of Science were using the library website more frequently than the students of other faculties. Responses showed that the Training Guides (Mean=4.00; SD = ±0.926) and past-paper portals (Mean=3.96; SD = ±0.989) accessed via the library website were useful. The chi-square test revealed a significant relationship of faculties with article requests (p=0.037) and adequacy of website information for academic work (p=0.036). Similarly, the level of students has a significant relationship with Selective Dissemination of Information (p=0.048); usefulness of the training guides (p=0.022); adequate research support (p=0.026); and effective organization of information (p=0.003). Overall responses revealed that the Library website is highly userfriendly (Mean=3.90; SD = ±0.909). One-way ANOVA revealed a significant relationship between the resourcefulness of the website and the respondents' overall satisfaction with the information received from the library website (p=0.021). These results evinced that the library website must comply with users' expectations and needs. Students' opinions and feedback emphasized on the need for updating the website through a benchmark of other library interfaces. FAQ section and Chat bot were a few suggestions made by the users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a tendency in reported documents pertaining to school education in Sri Lanka to have literally omitted school libraries and information resources. Teachers and students struggled to gain access to appropriate information resources. After performing a pilot survey to validate the reliability of the questionnaire, a sample of 209 subjects was randomly selected from 459 teachers in select National Schools in Batticaloa Education Zone. A semistructured questionnaire was administered across WhatsApp groups of those teachers and response rate was 77.5%. Data were analysed using One-Sample Wilcoxon Signed-Rank, Chi-Square, and thematic analysis since a mixed method was employed. In this survey, teachers have expressed that school libraries were essential in providing resources to support teaching-learning activities although they have not received sufficient support from school libraries. Study further found that the role of school librarians in educating teachers and students with respect to copyright was underrated. Therefore, as the study results revealed, there was a considerable gap between the need and the availability of resources, which needs to be bridged through school libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flow shop scheduling problem (FSSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem. This work, with the objective of optimizing the makespan of an FSSP uses a particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach. The problems are tested on Taillard’s benchmark problems. The results of Nawaz, Encore and Ham (NEH) heuristic are initialized to the PSO to direct the search into a quality space. Variable neighbourhood search (VNS) is employed to overcome the early convergence of the PSO and helps in global search. The results are compared with standalone PSO, traditional heuristics and the Taillard’s upper bounds. Five problem set are taken from Taillard’s benchmark problems and are solved for various problem sizes. Thus a total of 35 problems are solved. The experimental results show that the solution quality of FSSP can be improved if the search is directed in a quality space based on the proposed PSO approach (PSO-NEH-VNS).

Visually-impaired (VI) students still face unusual difficulties in accessing library resources although there are several assistive technologies and devices being available to help them to get access to information resources. Equality in services mandates libraries to strive for their best to assist these special-need users by examining and mitigating the challenges faced by them. In this regard, a case study was carried out at the Main Library of the University of Colombo, where 42 visually-impaired students were interviewed using a set of semi-structured interview questions. The study population constituted totally blind and partially impaired students. Issues facing by the respondents were identified over institutional, personal and technological factors. Out of different challenges they mentioned, lack of appropriate resources was drawing primary concern. Problems relevant to use of the Internet were identified based on 5 aspects: social, institutional, financial, personal, and technical issues. Those challenges significantly affected VI users having access to their learning resources. It was found that VI users were largely left out in the mainstream student community since they make up a very miniscule faction of the entire student population. Hence, it is recommended to establish a special assistance mechanism for VI users of the library, meanwhile training both VI students and library staff on finding information resources specifically intended for VI users, and using the assistive technologies and equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study, using mixed methods of bibliometric analysis, aims to cover the articles published in the Journal of the University Librarians' Association (JULA) of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2019. Primary goal of the study is to holistically analyze the journal in terms of important bibliometric aspects in light of improving LIS research on open access platforms. Analyses were executed to illustrate authorship impact, citation patterns, subject coverage, and visualization of citations' connections, co-authorship, and co-occurrence network. Among 127 articles authored by 182 librarians/library professionals analyses were performed to find the influential contributors, degree of collaboration, currency of citation, core journals, most preferred topics of research, and outstanding institutions. Single authorship constitutes the majority of the total contribution (62.5%) nevertheless the degree of collaboration steadily increased over time (0.37). Study findings also conform to the application of Lotka's law of author productivity. University of Peradeniya ranks first among outstanding universities that contributed more to the JULA. Application of Bradford's law identified core journals used by the contributors. Authors of this article employed MS Excel and SPSS for carrying out the analyses. They also experimented using VOSviewer for finding the co-occurrence of LIS subjects. Finally, the study intends to find out the areas of improvements needed in library science research in Sri Lanka. And, the authors shed their opinions on improving the existing open access journals in light of installing altmetric tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to find a sequence of jobs for the permutation flow shop to minimise the makespan. The shop consists of 10 machines. A feed-forward back-propagation artificial neural network (ANN) is used to solve the problem. The network is trained with the optimal sequences for five-, six- and seven-job problems. This trained network is then used to solve a problem with a greater number of jobs. The sequence obtained using the neural network is used to generate the initial population for the genetic algorithm (GA) using the random insertion perturbation scheme (RIPS). The makespan of the sequence obtained by this approach (ANN-GA-RIPS) is compared with that obtained using GA starting with a random population (ANN-GA). It was found that the ANN-GA-RIPS approach performs better than ANN-GA starting with a random population. The results obtained are compared with those obtained using the Nawaz, Enscore and Ham (NEH) heuristic and upper bounds of Taillard's benchmark problems. ANN-GA-RIPS performs better than the NEH heuristic and the results are found to be within 5% of the upper bounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic information resources can be either credible or unreliable. Vast majority of information on the Internet is neither authenticated nor having any mechanism to validate its credibility. Thus, it has been a great challenge for any researcher who uses them for their problem-solving. Education and research institutions use and contribute to the development of academic journals that broadly fall under two categories, namely subscribed and open access. In this regard, this paper discusses about the views of academics of Eastern University, Sri Lanka depending on these resources for using and publishing their research work. Particularly, this study investigates about the perception of academics over subscription journals and open access resources in regard to their accessibility, visibility and credibility. Summary of results show that researchers hold high value for online subscribed journals in terms of their credibility, meanwhile accessibility to the same is quite a challenge. On the other hand, open access journals give rise to visibility and affordability. Therefore, authors shed light on the need of making open access resources more credible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A preliminary study was carried out as an initiative to probe into the possibilities of incorporating mobile apps and social networks in medical library services. Major objective was to find out the trend and preference of medical faculty students in using mobile devices for accessing information. The cross-sectional survey design was used with mixed method. Self-administered questionnaire was distributed among students of eight medical faculties in Sri Lanka and 120 filled questionnaires were received from six medical faculties. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and factor analysis. The use of a mobile device was analyzed through factor analysis. Cronbach's alpha of the particular statements is 0.864 which indicate the adequate internal consistency of the statements and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy (KMO) and Bartlett test value is 0.788 which indicate that the data is suitable for factor analysis. The factor analysis resulted in four-factor model, which explain 66.43% of variance in the data. The four factors are 'educational use', 'entertainment use', 'basic communicational use' and 'free call use'. Since the factor - educational use explain highest percentage (39%) of variance in the data, it indicates that there is a potential to use mobile device for educational purposes. The results also have revealed that majority of the students (85.2%) retrieved medical information through web resources using mobile devices. They also collect information using personal communication especially from friends and lecturers (41.5%). Among the information sources which they use through the mobile devices, Google is at the first place (82.3%) and Wikipedia (80%) is in second place. Only 67.2% of them use the mobile device to read e-books. In the purpose of using mobile devices for educational purpose, highest usage was observed for retrieval of images (81.8%), information on drugs (76.6%) and clinical guidelines (72.3%). Slow Internet connectivity (77.9%), poor network or signal coverage (76.6%), and lack of Wi-Fi facilities in faculty settings (55.9%) are the major barriers to using of mobile devices. Despite the students are positive about mobile devices, they consider more about the authenticity of online information and lack of knowledge and awareness on access to medical information. Moreover, they were mostly inclined to Google and Wikipedia but were unaware of other online resources to access medical information. Therefore, adopting mobile devices in health/medical information literacy programmes and curricula are recommended with further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the decline of budgetary allocation for libraries, information is being made available to wider audience through alternative means, such as digital libraries and online repositories. Increasing demand for certain print materials urge libraries to exploit open-source alternatives, which are highly advantageous for libraries with scarce financial resources and voracious demand from their users. An interview survey results justified the establishment of digital library service as both students and academics, amongst other issues, recorded their inability to spare time for accessing certain print collections. In this regard, like other libraries in the country, the Library of Eastern University, Sri Lanka has initiated digital library initiatives using freely available software. Amongst a number of open-source software (OSS) available to create and manage digital library collections, Greenstone and DSpace are being experimented for developing two different types of repositories. However, these two software have slight merits and demerits over one another. This paper scrutinizes those features corresponding to the needs of and challenges faced by the Library of Eastern University, Sri Lanka (EUSL), which is in its initial stage of launching digitized collections representing both its academic works and local publications. The demand for unpublished works of students and past examinations papers is always high, hence, the Library is has started digitizing materials in demand and rare to find. This comparative analysis is solely based on experiences gained by the Library of Eastern University, Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the sequencing of jobs that arrive in a flow shop in different combinations over time. Artificial neural network (ANN) uses its acquired sequencing knowledge in making the future sequencing decisions. The paper focuses on scheduling for a flow shop with ‘m’ machines and ‘n’ jobs. The authors have used the heuristics proposed by Campbell et al.(1970, A heuristic algorithm for n-jobs m-machines sequencing problem) to find a sequence and makespan (MS). Then a pair wise interchange of jobs is made to find the optimal MS and total flow time (TFT). The obtained sequence is used for giving training to the neural network and a matrix called neural network master matrix (NNMM) is constructed, which is the basic knowledge of the neurons obtained after training. From the matrix, interpretations are made to determine the optimum sequence for the jobs that arrive in the future over a period of time. The results obtained by the ANN are compared with a constructive heuristics and an improvement heuristics. The results show that the quality of the measure of performance is better when ANN approach is used than obtained by constructive or improvement heuristics. It is found that the system’s efficiency (i.e., obtaining the optimal MS and TFT) increases with increasing numbers of training exemplars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]