Our information centre is the focal point in disseminating scientific information and makes available the underpinning theories of our interventions to all our in house staff and volunteers as well as to all others, who visit ADIC, coming from different parts of the country and different walks of life.

The Library and the Information Programme is a designated information resource provider in alcohol, tobacco and other drugs for academics and the general public. It also facilitates activities for other internal programmes of the organization and coordinates activities with other public and school libraries on information for alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. It also provides a framework for other archival and records management services for many library network initiatives where information is preserved, collected and made available with published and unpublished documents on alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.

Promoting User friendly services

In the year 2006, the Library and Information Programme functioned to gather, collate and disseminate information while maintaining lending services and to contribute towards prevention in a proactive manner.

The library emphasized its need on promoting innovative, quality services while adhering to the highest professional standards and the principles of being user-friendly, effective, efficient approaches. In doing so, a new database system such as the Winisis was introduced. New prevention aides were developed, and this was made available to a large number or organizations and individuals who actively carried out training to communities. These prevention aides were in the form of visual training materials such as CDs and enlarged photographs which depicted the current promotions from tele dramas and other television programmes. A large number of leaflets, stickers and banners were made available in both Sinhalese and Tamil so that district based resource persons, as well as individuals of the general public who are interested on prevention work, had options of borrowing the available materials.

Trainings

Apart form carrying out discussions, the library programme also carried out trainings for the staff and volunteers. This was mainly based on updating the staff and volunteers in new knowledge concerning prevention, and the same time introducing new relevant books on prevention for example the Tobacco Atlas 2005.

External Library Network

In order to curb the regional disparities on the provision of prevention information, the Library programme extended its services to regional network example library where the basic relevant information on prevention

At present there are links with twelve public libraries in which people are able to receive basic information on prevention. Here the notice boards were constantly updated with the latest information on prevention. Trainings were also provided to the Librarians which allowed them to disseminate information to the public.