Abstract:
Library professionals must play a dynamic role in promoting library collection to educate
researchers and convince them of the benefit of using resources for their academic and
research activities. In recent years, information is generated from every sector of human
society. However, managing these huge amounts of information is turning out to be very
difficult by the day. The Recent trend amongst information seekers is becoming very
specific and they require pin-pointed information. Along with this information explosion,
the academic libraries are split into various sections to manage various kinds of
information resources such as the reader section, periodical section, automation section,
electronic section, digital section, research support section, etc. For the management of all
subdivisions of the libraries, the information professionals are using several library
management software, management tools, and new technological services as well. Hence,
the main aim of this paper was to discuss the experience of creating and managing online
subject guides or research guides at the Eastern University, Sri Lanka (EUSL). Subject
Plus is a free and open-source tool that enables libraries to create and manage online
research guides. And this tool maps to the library resources while simultaneously helping
the researchers to find the right information at the right time. This Subject Plus tool can
be downloaded from http://www.subjectsplus.com and installed with prerequisite free
software such as PHP, MySQL Apache Web Server, and JavaScript along with Windows
or Linux operating systems. The installation part is quite the same as other Content
Management System (Joomla, WordPress, Drupal) tools but, the customization is quite
tailored and lengthy. The EUSL Library has implemented an online Subject Guide project
along with the already available Ubuntu server. And this was customized according to the
requirements of the University researchers using the available commercialized and openaccess information resources. Consequently, the developed online Subject Guide served
as a beneficial tool for researchers for On and Off-campus access, resource access
through the subjects or topics, A-Z list of databases access, subject librarian collaboration
with faculty staff. etc. As described, Subject Guides/Research Guides create awareness
about various digital resources and enhance the information-based services in the
academic libraries. Collectively, these implementation and efforts create awareness
among all other Sri Lankan university information professionals to adopt Subject Plus
open-source tools for their information management services.
Keywords: Subject plus, Subject guides, Research guides, Open source software,
Information management
