Abstract:
This paper begins with a brief discussion on user education, library orientation and
information literacy and comments that many programmes are being conducted in the Sri
Lankan public universities to support users, without any detailed knowledge of who is offering
what. This paper is an attempt to study the different programmes offers at present. The e-mail
list of the University Librarians' Association was used to contact all university librarians and
a questionnaire was used to gather data. There has been 43 responses from 28 librarians
from 12 universities. Findings are presented under eight sub headings; number and duration,
nomenclature and number of students, course contents, assessment and credit awarding, positive
effects of the programmes, support of teachers, other factors and barriers to implementation.
The study concludes that there are 73 programmes of different time lengths and most of them
are short traditional user education programmes. Although many are named as Information
Literacy, they do not seem to have the characteristics of information literacy programmes.
The same contents seem to be offered across the range of programmes, with a few exceptions
in the programmes over 20 hours. Only few programmes conduct any post-programme
assessment. Only six programmes are offered any credit values and all programmes are offered
independent of any curriculum integration apart from the programme offered by NILIS. The
librarians reported that a major problem was the inability to get a suitable time slot in the
student time table to offer the library programmes.
