Abstract:
University of Ruhuna is a thriving modern Sri Lankan university with strengths in
both research and teaching. Library system of University of Ruhuna provides an
enormous contribution to the university in order to provide access to scholarly
information through journals (online and printed), books, e-repositories and other
means. Library network of the university spend substantial amount of money for
subscribing to printed and electronic journals annually. Access to paid scholarly
literature is limited depending on the subscription type to the database or journal.
There is a renewed trend of searching for open-access (OA) knowledge which
break the price boundaries and provide better access to the current knowledge
among academic community. Open access repositories provide searching and
downloading of scholarly information materials for free of charge. Spending extra
time on sorting and filtering of OA-materials by information seekers out of the
search results obtained has been a major demerit of using OA knowledge. Finding
and searching on different open access repositories separately is also been a
difficult and time consuming task. A unified interface for searching on different OA
repositories worldwide can facilitates readers by reducing the searching time and
effort of different scholarly materials and OA repositories in the world. Harvester
System of University of Ruhuna (HaSURu) deployed in order to fulfil the gap of a
unified interface that can connect number of OA archives together and search
over the internet for OA information. HaSURu keeps OA information of OAIregistered
open-access archives worldwide. OAI is an organization that promotes
the better dissemination of knowledge among researchers. There are 1944 OA
repositories worldwide has registered under OAI as data providers. Present study
aimed at acquiring all the OA repository information from OAI and provide access
through a unified interface using an OAI-PMH-driven metadata harvester. This paper
discusses the process of installing and customizing the PKP OHS Harvester2 as an OA
information finder carried out at the University of Ruhuna. All the Information seekers of Sri Lanka will find this new service as a better source of access to OA
repositories worldwide for their future research work.
