Need for change in school library resource and organization: User study on Puducherry Government High and Higher secondary schools

ABSTRACT The following is a user study conducted among staff and students of government high schools and higher secondary schools in Puducherry, India, to identify the quality of collections and services provided and recommend necessary changes. The major findings are as follows. It was found that majority of the users accessed Tamil language newspapers (83.8%) and books to read comparing to English, but they also utilized the dictionary (73.7%) to a great extent. Only 63.6% users were satisfied with the library collection and dictionaries and encyclopedias showed a positive satisfaction mean of 4.03 value. The overall service satisfaction was positive with 4.07 mean value. A total of 66.7% users wanted changes in resource arrangement and of it, 71.2% wanted shelf labels and subject wise arrangement respectively. Overall study showed the need to improve the quality of collection and the need to modify the existing resource arrangement to meet the users’ needs.