Abstract:
Active presence of university libraries on the internet is becoming a hallmark of libraries commitment to facilitate the community to access the knowledge repositories of universities from around the world. Nowadays the university library websites in Sri Lanka play an important role in dissemination of information of the university and library resources. For insightful planning towards a strong internet based information delivery and communication, there is a need for continuous monitoring of library websites status. Built on this need, this paper provides a ranking of university library websites in Sri Lanka based on standard webometric methods. Webometrics methods measure the overall web presence of websites using various indicators.
The results showed that the library website in the Open University of Sri Lanka ranked 1st in WISER index while it ranked 6th according to visibility rank. University of Colombo library website came in 2nd place in WISER index while it ranked in 3rd position in scholar rank and richness rank. On the other hand, University of the Visual & Performing Arts library website was the 9th place in WISER index while it ranked in 4th position in scholar rank. According to the WIF index, library website in University of Moratuwa ranked 1st while it ranked 4th in WISER index. University of Sri Jayewardenepura library website came 2nd in WIF index while it ranked 7th according to WISER ranking. The correlation between WISER and WIF (inlinks) is having negative value i.e. -0.01744, which means that the relation between two ranking systems was inversely related. This says that there was no much association or closeness between WISER and WIF (inlinks). Furthermore, there has more significant correlation between WISER and size than between WISER and richness and scholars. Also there has positive relationship between external backlink and WIF (inlinks) which implied that there is much association or closeness between these two variables.
This ranking indicates the extent to which each university library website has suc-cessfully represented itself on the internet. The findings of the study will guide to the librarians to evaluate the strength of online presence of their library websites and plan to improve their status on the web. In general, the successful presence of these library websites on the web can be attributed to possessing appropriate number of web pages that influence their visibility through search engines, and thereby the number of received external links. Meanwhile, low richness of most library websites leaves room for them to improve their overall rank by sharing more rich files on the web.
