The Reading Tools are designed to assist experienced and novice readers by providing a rich context of related materials from a wide variety of largely open access sources. The tools use keywords to automatically search a relevant open access database for related materials which are presented to the reader in another window. Readers have a choice of tools, and within each tool a choice of databases, along with access to information about the database.

The Site Administrator is able to choose a default set of Reading Tools for all archives, and can specify a unique set of Reading Tools for each archive.

The Administrator can also create custom Reading Tools versions, or import versions from other PKP platforms.

A Reading Tool Version is simply a collection of databases, usually specific to a particular academic discipline, for example Cognitive Science. Version Metadata includes a title and a key ('Cognitive Science' and Cognitive_Science, respectively) as well as the version locale (say en_US) and a brief description.

Each Version contains a series of Contexts, groupings of searchable databases by type. Context groupings may be relatively generic (search against a the assigned group of databases for the Author's Work, or for Related Studies, etc.); or they can be fairly specific depending on the collection of databases (for example, if the database grouping was specific to Cognitive Science and related collections.) Each context can have a Title, an Abbreviation, and a brief Description.

Context Searches are internet-accessible search engines, collections, and scholarly databases. When they are created they must include a Title (eg. Google Scholar); URL (http://scholar.google.com); Search URL http://scholar.google.com/scholar?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=eng&as_sauthors=); Post Data, if necessary; and can include a description.

Versions and Contexts can be imported and exported between the Harvester and other compatible systems (other Open Harvester Systems installations as well as OJS and OCS); searches should be validated to ensure that they work properly.