A review of Information Literacy Initiatives in the Sri Lankan public universities

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.