Installation and Customization Experience of Metadata Harvester System: Case from University of Ruhuna

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.