Enhancing Cross-Language Based Searching Facility in Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC): Special Reference to Library System, University of Ruhuna

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