Training programmes and achievement of organizational objectives of public libraries in the northern province of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Public libraries are social entities of any community, thus, play significant roles in upgrading literacy of society. Especially, in remote zones of Northern Province of Sri Lanka, where resources are scarce, public libraries’ presence to help in education cannot be underestimated. With steady developmental activities taking place after ending the war in the area, public libraries are in need to transformation. Managing these libraries within limited resource-level is highly dependent on the capacity of human resources. In this regard, training in a systematic approach to enhance skills in acquisition management, reference services, circulation, current awareness services, and mobile library services will prove the worth of public libraries in rural areas. As a component of human resource development, training provides improvement in job performance of public librarians and library staff as per the expectation of their local government. This study identified a specific problem as to what extent the outcomes of the training programmes lead to achieve the objectives of the public libraries in Northern Province. Therefore, objectives are drawn to explore the beliefs and attitude of public librarians with respect to the existing training programme that expect the achievement of objectives of public libraries. Correlation between the existing training programmes and achievement of objectives in the public libraries will also be analyzed. For the purpose of establishing the relationship between the variables, a field survey was executed to collect data from the respective public libraries in Northern Province. Of 134 public libraries in the province, sample of 68 public libraries were selected applying stratified random sampling method from five district level public libraries for this study. A questionnaire, which is the commonly used tool to measure attitudes, was used as a tool for data collection. This study focused on the relationship between the training programme and its outcomes i.e. public library’s development, self-development, and performance improvement. The correlation (R) (0.610) explains a positive and moderate relationship. The coefficient of determination (R2) (0.373) explains that only 37.3% of the variance from the total variance. Hence, the statistical result of the present study concludes that training programme enhances the organisational development, self-development and performance improvement. There is a positive and moderate relationship between the training programme and the organisational development, self-development and performance improvement, which leads to the achievement of public library’s objectives. Due to the rapid change in the human resource management environment, Public Libraries have to adopt various techniques to achieve organisational objectives. Training librarians is one technique to achieve such objectives. Provision of training is the responsibility of the management of local government for the organisational development, self-development and performance improvement. Anyhow certain factors like lack of fund, inadequate number of librarians and management’s interest in training hinder training of librarians and that training could be improved through adequate funding, formulating training policy and recruiting adequate librarians.