A Comparative Study on the Provincial Library Services Boards in Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Provincial library development project has started in 1990 in order to decentralize the library system and services. Through, it has passed about 30 years after the beginning of the provincial library development project, there are only few actively existing provincial library services boards such as Uwa, Central, North Central and Sabaragamuwa. In fact, this study deals with the comparative study on provincial library services boards in Sri Lanka. The objectives of this paper are to study the existing activity and the situation of provincial library services boards and to identify the different programs and services among them, to investigate the contribution of the decentralization library service to the development process of the country and to identify the issues in the of provincial library services boards. The study is based on the assumption that effective of provincial library services boards are not functioning in a proper manner. This study is conducted both qualitative and quantitative data to be collected from primary and secondary sources. When collecting primary data, interviews, questionnaires are will be used. Prediction, comparison, relationship, critical analysis, illustrations and the SPSS data analyzing software will be used in data analysis. As the population, the effective provincial library service boards like Uwa, Central, North Central and Sabaragamuwa will be taken. 100 selected public and school libraries representing these four provinces will be used as the sample. 60% among these are public libraries while the rest 40% is school libraries. It is important to study about the provincial library development project as it is a recently started project in library field.