Abstract:
The Sri Lankan school education system is now paying attention to shift their tocus from
a teacher centered system to a more learner centered education system. However, due to
the extreme competitive nature of the GCE (Advanced level} Examination, students have
become more teacher dependent, rather than self learners. However, this situation has
become a serious drawback tor the university undergraduate at the higher education level.
This is adversely affecting the proper utilization of the library resources and services.
The answer to this problems lies in user education in general and developing information
literacy (IL) skills in particular. Initiatives have been made to address this issue at the
University level by the Library. One of the primary requisites of initiating such a
programme is to understand the present level of new students in terms of their library use
and skills. As such, a questionnaire was sent to all new applicants ( 1 ,976) for registration
for the 2006/2007 academic year to investigate their library behavior and related issues.
95% of the students responded and a random sample of 1,000 was selected for the
investigation. This sample consisted of 560 Social Science and Humanities students, 305
Science students and 135 Commerce students. The summarized findings arc given below:
Their school library according to the size of book collection
Up to 1,000 volumes 04.5%
1,001 to 2,000 voloumes 24.0%
2,001 to 5,000 voloumcs 17.5%
Over 5,000 voloumes 18°1
This shows that 70.3% of students have come trom a school where the library has a book
collection of above 2,000 volumes. Although this figure is small according to
international standards, it shows that there are somewhat significant libraries. This factor
is specially important, as 99.8 of the respondents mentioned that their schools have
school libraries hilc 98.3% said that there was a school librarian. Further, 43.4 %
mentioned that they have visited the school library at least once a week. In addition
49.6% said that they have used a public library.
