Adaptive System for Libraries Integration Case Study: University of Indonesia's Libraries

For many years, Academic Library’s Application at Indonesian Higher Education Institutions operates in a “stand-alone” mode. This causes a great loss of opportunity to share libraries resources that tend to be limited in each library. University of Indonesia’s libraries are the miniature of such a kind. University of Indonesia has more than one library that distributed in several faculties and several departments. Each library has its own collections with different library’s application and different policy. Very often, one has to travel to each library in order to find information needed. We propose a digital library system, which has capability to integrate resources from separated library locations. We call this system as LONTAR. LONTAR is an adaptive system, which integrates numerous resources and all libraries’ requirement differences. This system has improved interoperability and interconnectivity among libraries in University of Indonesia. Hence, it has improved the resources sharing among libraries. 1. Background For many years, Academic Library’s Application at Indonesian Higher Education Institutions operates in a “stand-alone” mode. This causes a great loss of opportunity to share libraries resources that tend to be limited in each library. Some digital libraries are different in nature. The digital libraries of the world are managed by many organizations, with different management styles, and different attitudes to collections and technology. According to Kochtanek [3], the digital library movement, still in its early stages, has begun to evolve from its early research platform to more fully developed applications, typically in selected content areas. Combined with classic research area dealing with electronic search, which is known as information retrieval, digital library has evolved its retrieval methods from conventional search, commonly using SQL syntax, to a rich of information retrieval system. Nowadays, this evolution has new challenges to get more efficient and accurate in dealing with information, which is distributed. University of Indonesia has many library collections, which are distributed in several faculties and several departments [7]. Few of them already have library automation systems that are mostly “stand-alone” application, so it can’t share their information collections. There are two types of collections: physical and digital. Physical means in the form of hardcopy while digital stands for softcopy. Most libraries possess physical collections. Few of them have digital and physical resources. In order to manage those types’ collections, a robust system is needed. Beside that, each library has different policy in managing collection. This policy varies in many aspects, such as, membership regulation, system accessibility, books acquisition, etc. Librarians 1 Faculty of Computer Science, University of Indonesia, Email: {rizal, herik, zhasibua}@cs.ui.ac.id 503 Proceedings of iiWAS2006