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Libraries are institutions that provide access to a comprehensive collection of information and resources for educational, research, and recreational purposes. They serve as repositories of knowledge and offer numerous services to their communities. In this process, libraries play a paramount role in preserving and conserving library materials for future generations. The objectives of this paper were to investigate the significant Preservation and Conservation (PAC) initiatives of library materials from the ancient periods (3rd Century BC to 5th Century AD), the colonial period (1505 to 1948), and the post-independence period (1948 to date), to identify the gaps related to the current practices of PAC in Sri Lanka and to identify the issues related to PAC in Sri Lanka. This study focused on a qualitative research method. Relevant literature was found through secondary sources such as books, journal articles, conference papers, organizational reports and websites based on subject-related keywords. The Department of National Museums (DNM), Department of National Archives (DNA) and National Library and Documentation Services Board (NLDSB) and Sri Lankan University Libraries (ULs), were purposively selected. The published year was not considered during the process, and priority was given to Sri Lankan and foreign-authored publications on PAC of library materials in Sri Lanka. Literature was analyzed based on above mentioned three time frames selected for the study. The study identified growing trends in PAC practices from ancient to post-independence periods. Even though some evidence goes back to King Vijaya's period (483 BC), official writing was started in 103-77 BC. Some writing materials, such as inscriptions, palm leaves, and golden plates, were used during this period. Later, in the colonial period, the Portuguese, Dutch and British developed writing materials and established positions such as Record keepers and Archivists. Then, in the post-independence period, the DNM, DNA, NLDSB and ULs were identified as pioneering organizations that led the task of preserving. It was identified gaps between the literatures and existing literature only identified palm leaves as a main library material to be conserved and preserved. The main issues derived from the analysis were a lack of financial allocations, policies, laws and regulations, training, and research related to the field. The study pointed out the need for a separate PAC unit to handle the preservation activities of library materials in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploratory investigation about the contribution of libraries in achieving the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The study focusses on how libraries could formulate plans to integrate the SDGs into all its programmes and projects. The study identifies nine SDGs that require the direct involvement of libraries as well as some successful activities carried out by certain libraries for this purpose. The paper, after exploring the situation of academic libraries in Sri Lanka, found that eight universities in Sri Lanka have included 'sustainable development' in their strategic plans and academic libraries integrate them in library resources, services and programmes. However, these libraries are lacking in mapping of their activities with SDGs. The study recommends that academic libraries should map SDGs to the libraries' programmes, services, and resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the prevailing competitive environment, libraries seem difficult to survive with traditional information services. Many of business organizations seem to practice multidimensional businesses and expand their profit potentials through diversification. Getting experience from business sector organizations, university libraries need to strategize the service delivery and retain the users through diversification of the product/service. Diversification can be implemented through innovation of directly related library services, indirectly related services and additional services probably not related to the typical library service but would be possible to provide by the library (out of the box). This paper investigates the Sri Lankan university librarians' perspective towards the implementation of such services in their libraries. The study also examines the possible barriers for the diversification. The paper involved the conceptual analysis and sample survey with library practitioners. Findings indicate that university libraries in Sri Lanka are providing diversity of services and have made many attempts to diversify them through 'direct library services', 'indirect library services' and 'additional services'. Relatively higher potential is shown with regard to directly and indirectly related services but the diversification through additional services indicated very low. The librarians face challenges for diversification stretching out through administrative factors, knowledge deficiencies, organizational environment and attitudinal issues of library managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic libraries have an innovative service called 'Research Support Service' to support institutional research. Under the research support service, the worldwide academic libraries provide a range of services. The library of Eastern University, Sri Lanka provides research support services since 2014. This paper investigates the research support service model of the library of Eastern University, Sri Lanka (EUSL). This investigation analysed the documents such as official correspondence, pamphlets, library home page and students' feedback. The research support service of EUSL library focused more on training the undergraduates in research related aspects by organising a series of sessions on students' requests. As an extension of the research support service, the library also has introduced the individual research consultation service, where the researchers as an individual or group meets the library professionals to get personal assistance on research. The feedback analysis showed that the undergraduates highly appreciated the service on its usefulness. Moreover, the service was commended by programme review of the university grants commission of Sri Lanka. There are challenges to implementing this service, such as lack of skills and capacity among library professionals, lack of human resources and physical facilities, the conventional mindset of library professionals and lack of proper marketing of library services. However, this was a successful service, and increased the recognition of the library and library professionals among students and faculty. In turn, library professionals were invited to higher-level committees to contribute to the institutional research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the research productivity of five state universities of Sri Lanka during 2015-2018, using scholarly output, citation impact and collaboration metrics of SciVal, and the contribution of the university libraries towards research excellence. Five multi-disciplinary state universities; University of Colombo (UoC), Kelaniya (UoK), Peradeniya (UoP), Ruhuna (UoR) and Sri Jayewardenepura (UoSJP) were selected as the sample. During the study period, 4723 publications and 3831 authors have been recorded, of which UoC and UoP records the highest numbers. UoR records the highest publications in top journal percentile and highest number of views (72) among the five universities. A total of 33104 citations are reported while UoP depicts the highest citation count (18322) as an individual university, while UoR records the highest h5-index (39). Highest Field Weighted Citation Impact (3.18) and the highest citations per publication (12.4) is recorded by UoP while the highest output in top citation percentile (32.5%) is recorded by UoR. UoR records the highest overall international collaboration (74.4) during the studied period and UoP records the highest academic/corporate collaboration (2.2). University libraries provide collections and conducive environments for researchers, training in searching for information, referencing styles and use of reference management software, plagiarism detection and they maintain Institutional Repositories. The study established that there is much scope for university libraries to expand the services to support research productivity and recommends that librarians should consider on more current support areas like research data management, measuring research impact, and digital curation in order to support their universities to achieve excellence in research productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A compelling argument raised by Bolton and Oliver, states that only customers' assessment of continuously provided services, which may depend on performance-only evaluation, deserves attention. As libraries are services provided continuously and considered in general to be a public service, it is important to research this issue. Thus this paper discusses four research problems based on quality domains, overall customer satisfaction, quality paradigm and the causality in the area of academic libraries in Sri Lanka. The paper concludes that the overall customer satisfaction is related to both satisfaction ratings in the form of gap scores and performance-only scores of quality domains, although the relationship between overall satisfaction and quality domains based on gap scores was weak, indicating statistical non-significance. The performance-only paradigm was found to be a statistically better paradigm, which produced significantly better predictors of overall customer satisfaction than the disconfirmation paradigm. Thus, all individual service quality domains, except Web services, were significant predictors of overall customer satisfaction in libraries. The study produced a final model based on the performance-only paradigm, with a linear relationship between customer satisfaction and service quality constructs in university libraries in Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT), particularly internet, and the increasing development of user education forms and methods, such as new information literacy initiatives have resulted in significant changes in academic libraries. With these unprecedented changes, academic librarians in Sri Lanka have to deal with instructional processes more effectively and efficiently. The primary concern of this paper is to understand the concept 'user education' in the local context and its present practices in university libraries. Even more, this study intends to understand problems encountered, challenges being faced and potential new opportunities available on user education in university libraries in Sri Lanka. The total outcome of this paper is beneficial for researchers, policy makers, university authorities and academic librarians in Sri Lanka to understand the real situation which exists behind instructional activities of university libraries and to design, develop, implement policies and make strategies on pertinent subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web 2.0 is a popular technology that creates new paths in communication, networking, building partnerships and resource sharing. Though Web 2.0 technology helps the libraries to employ innovative web-based services, fewer studies have been conducted to identify the utilization of Web 2.0 tools by Sri Lankan libraries. The aim of this paper is, to explore the types of Web 2.0 applications employed and to identify the purposes of embracing Web 2.0 applications in Sri Lankan university libraries. The Sri Lankan government university libraries which are under the University Grant Commission (UGC) of Sri Lanka were taken as the research population of this study and the total population was considered as the sample. Content analysis technique was adopted in this study for fifteen Sri Lankan government university libraries. The research instrument was a checklist consists of 60 checkpoints based on similar checklists found in the literature related to studies conducted on Web 2.0 applications and their usage. Data collection was conducted by accessing the web pages of these university library websites within a month period. Except for one university library, all the other fourteen university libraries introduced at least one Web 2.0 application with the primary features in their websites. Out of seven Web 2.0 tools considered in the study, Real Simple Syndication and Social Network Services are the most popular applications while Blogs, Vodcast and Podcast are less frequently used. Instant Messages and Wikis have not been implemented by any of them. Sri Lankan university libraries should be more focused on deploying Web 2.0 applications in their library websites to satisfy the needs of today's modernized user and also to be compatible with frequently changing technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A library website plays an enhanced role compared to its traditional physical library while providing a wide variety of library services to its users. Evaluation of library websites is a key to realize the extent of user acceptance of the website and to improve the overall quality of the website. Under such backdrop, this paper provides a framework for ranking university library websites in Sri Lanka based on two standard webometric methods. The proposed framework consists of quantitative web presence measuring attributes namely; size, visibility, rich files and scholars along with simple and comprehensible mathematical calculations. The library administrators can get awareness about whether their website has effectively represented itself on the internet with better performance from the ranking results. The findings of the study will guide to the librarians to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses accordingly with the performance of their library websites. In general, the effective presence of these library websites on the internet can be passed on as the top by having proper number of site pages in the website that impact their perceivability through web search tools and accordingly the quantity of received external links. Meanwhile, libraries having low rich files can publish more rich files on the web to improve their overall rank. The research approach, criteria and their relative impact provide useful information in monitoring the effectiveness of the current websites and provide strategic suggestions to develop enhanced websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main library of the General Sir John Kotelawela Defence University conducted a survey of the first and third-year undergraduates of the Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Management, Social Sciences and Humanities, to investigate the use and user satisfaction on library services and resources. The study employed the 455 structured questionnaires to the whole population of undergraduates as the main tool for collecting data. Further, various registers were used to count the number of users. Collected data were analyzed using SPSS Version 20. The major findings of the study revealed that the respondents were satisfied with the library resources and services of the library as a whole. Also, the study found that many of the respondents visit the library for more than one reason, whereas the majority of the respondents visit the library for accessing past papers. Other findings show that the largest proportion of the respondents visit the library once a week. As for resources, the textbooks were ranked first, followed by the newspapers/magazine, and reference sources. The less frequently used resources are CD/DVD/VCD, online journals, databases, and library web links. To meet undergraduate information requirements and make them aware of the available resources and services, it is recommended to conduct information literacy programs as well as awareness programs at regular intervals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological applications have transformed the roles of academic libraries and they provide "higher-end-support" and play key role reforming education in academic institutions in the blooming information society. The paper will focus particularly on ICT based library service facilities and the usage of those facilities in the library. The objectives of this study were to identify the usage of the modern facilities of the main library, to find out the trend of users information seeking behavior in ICT based library facilities and to reveal the major reasons of using ICT based modem facility area of the main library, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka (WUSL). The case study was carried out gathering data on the statistics of the usage or IC1 based modern library and information service facilities. Ihe data were collected for the period from 2010 to 2015 as the application of ICT into library service is still in primary stage. The study found that the usage of modem facility area has gone up significantly more than the latter part of the period. The undergraduate students' trend was to access the modern facilities in the library as the way of building bridges for fulfilling their information needs. The usage of the library has recognized the ICT as fast information generated source. So, the existing space should be expanded and increased number of access points with infrastructure facilities for activating expected targets. In addition to that the library must move and focus by creating good relationship with user community and adopt information management skills in order to provide sustainable library and information services to achieve academic mission of the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal Library and Information Science (LIS) education in Sri Lanka began in 1961 with the commencement of a short programme by the Sri Lanka Library Association (the then Ceylon Library Association). From 1961 to 1997, many programmes were introduced but some were terminated due to various reasons. The introduction of new LIS programmes was accelerated from 1997 onwards as a result of the reforms in the education system which brought significant changes in LIS education. There were many issues affecting the LIS education system of Sri Lanka but without due attention of the authorities. In order to understand the issues concerning the LIS education system in a holistic manner; a research project was carried out from the year 2004 to 2007. Several aspects regarding LIS education were studied in depth, for example, the current available LIS programmes and providers, course contents, LIS faculty and facilities. This paper presents the current status of LIS providers and programmes in the country. Eight university and non university LIS education providers were identified from a survey. At the university level there are six organizations; the National Institute of Library and Information Sciences, the Department of LIS affiliated to a university faculty, two faculties offering several postgraduate level LIS programmes, and two units affiliated to universities. At the non-university level there are two types of organizations (an association and three colleges) conducting the programme - the Sri Lanka Library Association and three National Colleges of Education. The survey also identified a total of 24 programmes at six different academic levels comprising six Certificate programmes, six Diploma programmes, three Bachelors programmes, three Post Graduate Diploma programmes, four Masters programmes and two Research Degree programmes. The paper highlights the absence of a co-ordinating body for LIS education in Sri Lanka and it concludes by identifying a suitable body for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the results of the user satisfaction survey conducted in the Jaffna University library among the undergraduates of general degree bioscience students in August 2010. The objectives of the study were to assess the library user satisfaction regarding the currently available information sources and services and to identify the unmet needs of the undergraduates for the future developments in the library. Self administered questionnaire survey was conducted among these undergraduates. The study revealed that the library retains as essential component to facilitate the general degree bioscience undergraduates' learning and research activities. The study clearly enumerated that the efficiency of some of the presently available services such as photocopying services, interlibrary loan services, selective dissemination of information and current awareness service were not met the undergraduates' expectations. . The findings of the survey leave plenty of scope for improvement in library activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses about the possibility of incorporating the component of student learning needs (SLN), to the basic Acquisition Formula designed for the Open University of Sri Lanka. The Acquisition Formula was adopted for the distribution of funds allocated to acquire learning materials, among faculties of a university. The learning component indicates mainly the student requests. Although the formulae developed have been with special reference to the OUSL, they can be adopted to any other university library with minor modifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]