Abstract:
The Library System, University of Ruhuna takes a vital place among the
academic libraries in Sri Lanka. The library manages all the resources
through integrated library management software called “Koha” and the
cataloguers adding the bibliographic information of library materials to the
system using both Sinhala and English languages. Basically, if the item is
written in Sinhala, the Bibliographic data, especially the title of the item and
name of the author/s, added using Sinhala language. Moreover, if the item
is written in English, the bibliographic data, the title of the item name of the
author/s, and etc. added using English language. However, if a library user
searches author’s name of an item written in Sinhala using English language,
then the available items will not be searched. It is a kind of enormous issue
face by the library users and the users will dissatisfy about the search
results. To overcome this issue, the entire database has to be altered by
adding additional bibliographic tag to enter the author’s name in English for
the materials written in Sinhala. There were around 269,256 records in the
database as of 10th December 2023 and among them around 50% of items
were recorded in Sinhala. If this task is done manually, it would take around
more than six months period to edit each item and will require high man
power capacity. Hence this study aimed to provide a solution to enhance the
searching facility of the integrated library management system of University
of Ruhuna through upgrading the cross-language based author searching
and complete this task withing a shorter period using less man power. Researchers went through different methods and among them, the best
method was to use “SEE FROM TRACING” feature at the MARC format
of the authority files in Koha to edit the authority records in the library
management system. To feed the data to the above field within a shorter
period without allocating separate team of catalogers, researchers used
MarcEdit software application and online language translator platform
(Online Doc Translator) to convert the authors name in Sinhala to English.
Finally, researchers were able to achieve the objectives by making relevant
adjustment to the authority files within shorter period without allocating
extra manpower hours. Now the library users are given the searching facility
to search the library items written in Sinhala through typing the author’s
name in English
