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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]

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]

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]