P 27 Enabling access to open-access repositories using metadata harvester: Harvester System for University of Ruhuna

Abstract

As a research institute, a University library must provide enough avenues to find relevant academic knowledge (literature) for researchers in their desired field of studies. Library of University of Ruhuna spent SLR 5 million to get the subscriptions for online and printed journals annually. Service of these proprietary journals is limited to a number of full-text articles depending on the subscription base and the period. In such circumstances, researchers tend to use access to free and open access journals via common search engines in the World Wide Web. Open access repositories provide searching and downloading facilities to the scholarly materials for free. Even though there are free journals, research articles or related scholarly materials scattered over the world, researchers need to spend lot of time to find a perfect match to their searching query. Knowing and browsing all the open access repositories in the world apart is a difficult and time consuming task. Implementation of HaSURu Metadata will addresses this issue perfectly by enabling the access to a worldwide collection of multidisciplinary academic knowledge through a single interface. HaSURu is capable of keeping the records of metadata of various digital materials hosted in external data providers. Researchers can use HaSURu to search among a large collection of pre-defined open access repositories all over the world and download the full-text article from the original source to the PC or other mobile device irrespective of time and location. HaSURu is updated frequently with new information about data providers. It is also scheduled to update and re-index automatically monthly. Redundant hardware setup and MySQL replication system will keep HaSURu up and running 24 hours throughout the week to serve the patrons. HaSURu is a low cost solution for the massive requirements and access issues of open access multidisciplinary academic literature from world.