Product/service diversification through direct, indirect and additional services: librarian’s perspective in Sri Lankan Universities

In the prevailing competitive environment, libraries seem difficult to survive with traditional information services. Many of business organizations seem to practice multidimensional businesses and expand their profit potentials through diversification. Getting experience from business sector organizations, university libraries need to strategize the service delivery and retain the users through diversification of the product/service. Diversification can be implemented through innovation of directly related library services, indirectly related services and additional services probably not related to the typical library service but would be possible to provide by the library (out of the box). This paper investigates the Sri Lankan university librarians’ perspective towards the implementation of such services in their libraries. The study also examines the possible barriers for the diversification. The paper involved the conceptual analysis and sample survey with library practitioners. Findings indicate that university libraries in Sri Lanka are providing diversity of services and have made many attempts to diversify them through ‘direct library services’, ‘indirect library services’ and ‘additional services’. Relatively higher potential is shown with regard to directly and indirectly related services but the diversification through additional services indicated very low. The librarians face challenges for diversification stretching out through administrative factors, knowledge deficiencies, organizational environment and attitudinal issues of library managers

Open Access e-Repositories: Supporting and enhancing scholarship in the digital age

PowerPoint presentation Open Access e-Repositories: Supporting and enhancing scholarship in the digital ag

Role of Open Access e-repositories of Sri Lanka in the commercial e-repository environment

Although information business in the world is dominated by commercial resource suppliers today, users of academic libraries expect free access to information they need. High subscription prices and various access restrictions of commercial e-repositories hinder the library’s effort to provide free information for their patrons. This issue is specially occurring in developing countries due to budgetary restrictions and unavailability of modern technology. In this circumstance, Open Access (OA) concept has been popular among scholarly communities and many institutions today have initiated OA e-repositories to serve the users under a sharing basis. This movement in Sri Lanka still seems in the developing stage and is getting more attention from users as well as librarians. Open Access e-repositories have a great role to play in order to save the user from hands of commercial profit oriented information providers and to serve the people with free access to information. Scholarly communities, librarians and funding agencies need to collaborate to make this process easy and successful. Poor content, lack of proper policies, and lack of awareness were found as barriers to this process

Product/Service Diversification Potentials in Academic Libraries of Sri Lanka

Constant innovation of technology and changing of consumer behavior and social attitudes have made customer-needs are divers and variety seeking. In economic view, this ‘Turbulence of Environment’ has created a competition among entrepreneurs and therefore, many companies today utilize various strategic application to their businesses to win this competition. This move is also common to the Library and Information Service sector. As a result, users today have many options for information seeking other than the library and academic libraries face with budgetary restrictions from their parent organizations and declining user interest towards the conventional services they provide. Librarians are compelled to seek for survival potentials and response to issues of retaining user-interest and cost recovery avenues. Like business companies, academic libraries have to apply innovative strategies to expand the market share and one of these strategic applications is to diversify their products /services in accordance with the diversity of user needs. The purpose of this paper is to examine how far the academic librarians in Sri Lanka have understood the potential of product/service diversification in their libraries and discuss of the potential framework that helps them apply the diversification strategies in academic library sector. A questionnaire based survey was administered with 51 academic librarians in Sri Lanka in order to check the already available services, possible services and impossible services against a list of services determined by literature review and professional experience of the author. The check list included three categories of services: directly related library services, indirectly related library services and unrelated services. Commonly expected services from any academic library were considered as directly related services while indirectly related services were the services which are not compulsory, but can be provided by the library. Unrelated services were the non-information services that can be provided as additional services by the library for cost recovery of profit earning purposes. Results indicated that as an average directly related services of the library were available (68%) or possible to provide (22%) by 90% libraries. Indirectly related services were available in 41% libraries and were possible by 29 % libraries while 30% libraries are not able implement them. Unrelated services were available in 13% libraries and 18% of librarians perceived them as possible in libraries. However in average 69% of librarians perceived this as impossible in their libraries. Interpretation of the study reveals that academic librarians are mostly strict to the directly related library services and have quite concern about indirectly related services. Although there are many avenues to diversify their directly or indirectly related service to serve the diversity of needs of users, only a few librarians have concentrated on diversification strategy. Unrelated services which have cost recovery potentials were very poorly implemented. Capability issues such as capital restrictions, technological barriers, lack of interest and support from higher authorities, lack of entrepreneurial view among librarians and reluctance to take risk in unrelated services were seen as issues to implement service diversification strategies. It is recommended to train librarians on areas of entrepreneurship, creative thinking and leveraging of resource capabilities. Keywords: Academic libraries, Product/Service Diversification, Diversification potentials, Strategic Application, Information Marketin

පුස්තකාලයේ තීරණගැනීමේ ක්‍රියාවලිය සඳහා කාර්යමණ්ඩල සහභාගිත්වය ලබාගැනීම (Obtaining employee assistance for decision making process of the library)

Library is a service organization which provides services to patrons coming from different backgrounds. Patrons are various due to their age, social status, educational level and culture and therefore, decision making process of the library should be operated more carefully. This article discusses the important factors to be considered when taking decisions in the library

Role of Open Access e-repositories of Sri Lanka in the commercial e-repository environment

Although information business in the world is dominated by commercial resource suppliers today, users of academic libraries expect free access to information they need. High subscription prices and various access restrictions of commercial e-repositories hinder the library’s effort to provide free information for their patrons. This issue is specially occurring in developing countries due to budgetary restrictions and unavailability of modern technology. In this circumstance, Open Access (OA) concept has been popular among scholarly communities and many institutions today have initiated OA e-repositories to serve the users under a sharing basis. This movement in Sri Lanka still seems in the developing stage and is getting more attention from users as well as librarians. Open Access e-repositories have a great role to play in order to save the user from hands of commercial profit oriented information providers and to serve the people with free access to information. Scholarly communities, librarians and funding agencies need to collaborate to make this process easy and successful. Poor content, lack of proper policies, and lack of awareness were found as barriers to this process

Product/Service Diversification Potentials in Academic Libraries of Sri Lanka

Constant innovation of technology and changing of consumer behavior and social attitudes have made customer-needs are divers and variety seeking. In economic view, this ‘Turbulence of Environment’ has created a competition among entrepreneurs and therefore, many companies today utilize various strategic application to their businesses to win this competition. This move is also common to the Library and Information Service sector. As a result, users today have many options for information seeking other than the library and academic libraries face with budgetary restrictions from their parent organizations and declining user interest towards the conventional services they provide. Librarians are compelled to seek for survival potentials and response to issues of retaining user-interest and cost recovery avenues. Like business companies, academic libraries have to apply innovative strategies to expand the market share and one of these strategic applications is to diversify their products /services in accordance with the diversity of user needs. The purpose of this paper is to examine how far the academic librarians in Sri Lanka have understood the potential of product/service diversification in their libraries and discuss of the potential framework that helps them apply the diversification strategies in academic library sector. A questionnaire based survey was administered with 51 academic librarians in Sri Lanka in order to check the already available services, possible services and impossible services against a list of services determined by literature review and professional experience of the author. The check list included three categories of services: directly related library services, indirectly related library services and unrelated services. Commonly expected services from any academic library were considered as directly related services while indirectly related services were the services which are not compulsory, but can be provided by the library. Unrelated services were the non-information services that can be provided as additional services by the library for cost recovery of profit earning purposes. Results indicated that as an average directly related services of the library were available (68%) or possible to provide (22%) by 90% libraries. Indirectly related services were available in 41% libraries and were possible by 29 % libraries while 30% libraries are not able implement them. Unrelated services were available in 13% libraries and 18% of librarians perceived them as possible in libraries. However in average 69% of librarians perceived this as impossible in their libraries. Interpretation of the study reveals that academic librarians are mostly strict to the directly related library services and have quite concern about indirectly related services. Although there are many avenues to diversify their directly or indirectly related service to serve the diversity of needs of users, only a few librarians have concentrated on diversification strategy. Unrelated services which have cost recovery potentials were very poorly implemented. Capability issues such as capital restrictions, technological barriers, lack of interest and support from higher authorities, lack of entrepreneurial view among librarians and reluctance to take risk in unrelated services were seen as issues to implement service diversification strategies. It is recommended to train librarians on areas of entrepreneurship, creative thinking and leveraging of resource capabilities. Keywords: Academic libraries, Product/Service Diversification, Diversification potentials, Strategic Application, Information Marketin

Fabrication, swelling, and biological properties of surface-patterned hydrogels based on poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate)

Hydrogels are networks of hydrophilic polymers which can retain large amounts of water. Poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) [poly(HEMA)] is a synthetic hydrogel well known for various biomedical applications due to excellent biocompatibility, high retention of water, and high mechanical and chemical stability, but, has limited applications in tissue engineering because of low cell-adhesion properties. Patterning surfaces of hydrogels with microscale features changes the surface properties and enables the regulation of functions of cultured cells. However, generating patterns of intricate microstructures onto the hydrogel surfaces remains challenging. In this work, arrays of micropillars were successfully patterned onto a hydrogel based on 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate by using soft lithography technique. The self-delamination of the hydrogel induced by swelling in solvents such as phosphate buffered saline, deionized water, 60% ethanol, and absolute ethanol facilitated the reproducible replication of the pattern. The swelling, mechanical properties, and structural parameters of the hydrogel were studied in detail. The biological properties of the hydrogel were evaluated using HeLa cells and human mesenchymal stem cells. It was revealed that the attachment of cells on the intrinsically non-adhesive hydrogel was enhanced by the micropillars. As well, the stem cells tend to form aggregates on the hydrogel and the size and number of cell aggregates can be tuned by changing the height of the micropillars. The fabricated material was not cytotoxic and did not inhibit the chondrogenic and adipogenic differentiation of stem cells at the composition used in synthesis

Examining the relationship between competitive capability and perceived service quality in university libraries

As modern Information Technology has created a way to a variety of information service opportunities, many options other than the conventional library service are available for users. A stiff competition has emerged among information service providers and therefore university library professionals too have to think of their competitive advantage. Service quality has gained a high concern as a strategy for developing the competitive position of an organization and many studies in different fields have established a strong relationship between service quality and competitive advantage. Viewing inversely, some practitioners contemplate that the competitive position of resource capabilities can influence the improvement of service quality. In order to examine the relationship between competitive position and the service quality in a university library context, an exploratory survey was employed utilizing a VRIO based questionnaire and LibQUAL+ based instrument with 89 library professionals selected from 15 state university libraries in Sri Lanka. The study reveals that there is a moderate positive correlation between two variables (r = .286, n= 66, p = .020). As the relationship is moderate, further studies seem essential to support the hypothesis. The large percentage of residuals indicates that there are more factors contributing to the service quality in university libraries. This study deploys a robust process to develop a measuring instrument for a competitive position in university libraries and uncovers many research areas in the field

Accommodating Inclusive Education in LIS research: In the case of VICLIS conferences

As an important part of education, the library should accommodate Inclusive Education to ensure quality and equity. This paper examines ten (10) research abstracts and presentations presented at the Virtual International Conference on Library and Information Science (VICLIS) initiated by the SLTC Research University Sri Lanka, under the subtheme "Library Services for People with Special Needs" to explore the tendency of Library & Information science researchers to adapting the inclusive education in libraries. The sample included 25 papers submitted by LIS researchers from 08 countries to VICLIS conferences and after a review process, 10 papers selected from India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka were analyzed using the thematic analysis method. Findings indicated that themes such as accessibility to books, improving reading and writing skills in visually impaired students, challenges faced by differently-abled users, the role of libraries in supporting students with disabilities, repackaging of information individual needs, and availability of assistive technology devices in university libraries were dominant in LIS research. Findings imply that a new theme “Inclusive Library Service” should be incorporated into the library service. LIS researchers have recommended providing Braille books, addressing access to information issues, promoting accessibility in library buildings, implementing the Marrakesh Treaty to support visually impaired students, improving staff awareness and training, and collaborating with relevant organizations. Libraries can play a vital role in empowering users with special needs. Future LIS research should concentrate on assistive technologies, information literacy for differently-abled people, collection development, and professional development needs in libraries to enhance inclusive education