Librarians’ competency and willingness towards serving the users with disabilities: where do Sri Lankan librarians stand?

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a survey that aims at exploring the potential of Sri Lankan library professionals for serving the disabled users. Results revealed that the librarians are not adequately knowledgeable and sufficiently skilled to operate an inclusive service for people with special needs, though, they are extremely willing to do so. The paper also discusses the areas that should be strengthened in order to empower the librarians while highlighting the necessity of broadening the boundaries to welcome this very special group of users.

University libraries: The role of an accessible campus on the inclusion of users with special needs

“…These results are similar to other studies developed, as one developed in Sri Lanka (Wijayarathe; Amarasekara, 2015), where a predominance of professionals with similar age, gender, academic level and length of service was found, and in which a scenario of inexistence of good practices on accessibility and inclusion in library management was described.…”