Search

This paper describes a number of education and literacy initiatives currently underway at the University of Limerick and as initiated within the University of Limerick library to reach out to two small minorities in Ireland - Irish Travellers and the Roma Gypsies - who have traditionally been socially marginalised from "mainstream" education. Both groups exhibit a long tradition of their social marginalisation from the "mainstream" population and they score high on all indices of unemployment, poor health and child mortality. Since 2003, the University of Limerick has been in receipt of HEA (Higher Education Authority) funding for the Traveller/Roma Initiative Programme. This paper describes a range of innovative information access and literacy initiatives as implemented within UL Library and describes the setting-up of the Traveller-Roma Access Resource Centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to find out what Public Libraries in Dublin know about the Library Services of the National Council for the Blind of Ireland. The tool for measurement and evaluation was a survey conducted from a selection of Public Libraries in the Dublin area. The Paper can be divided into three sections. The first section introduces the National Council for the Blind of Ireland and more specifically, the Library service. The second section focuses upon the survey. The survey takes the form of a questionnaire and was conducted across twelve Public Libraries in the Dublin area. The third section of the paper contains the results and recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview on the services offered by the Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net) in Ireland. It states that the group is a nonprofit organisation that supports and advocates for the wide availability of electronic resources by library users. Programmes include open access publishing, the creation of institutional repositories of local content, and open source software for libraries.

Discussions of 'skills' in higher education often conflate 'information technology' skills and 'information skills'. The second term is broader and more directly related to the aims and processes of higher education as a 'knowledge creation' activity. A clear distinction should be made between information skills and information technology skills. Both information skills and information technology skills are essential parts of a wider concept of information literacy. A broadly-based definition of information skills in higher education reflects twin dimensions of the 'competent student' and the 'information literate' person. For the development of the information literate person SCONUL proposes seven sets of skills developing from a basic competence in library and IT skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]