Initiatives for the Social Inclusion of "Non-Traditional" Library Users - The University of Limerick Experience".

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]