Bharathilibnet: An Online Union Catalogue Model for Bharathidasan University and its Affiliated Colleges

This paper aims to describe BharathiLibnet, a centralized and distributed online information system based on open source software

The system is based on open source software (Koha, MySql, Perl, Zebra and Z39.50.

The findings of the study suggest that BharathiLibnet can serve as an ideal access tool for Bharathidasan University and its affiliated college libraries bibliographic information of books and serials and will enhance academic and research activities in the region by facilitate sharing of knowledge resources and familiarity on new resources to the academics and researchers of all participating institutions.

This is an experimental prototype study and only selected samples were considered and examined. This will be investigated further with a wider population, which will improve the BharathiLibnet System. Practical Implications-These results suggest that a system like BharathiLibnet could be applicable to all the affiliated colleges and other institutions in the region, which would help to serve the students and researchers working in colleges affiliated to Bharathidasan University in quickly accessing information from other institutes and thus save time, cost and labor in information processing and management.

The paper describes the application of open source software (Koha) as a form of resource sharing tool and a single authoritative source of Bharathidasan University and its affiliated college library resources.