Purpose Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have opened up a gateway for ongoing learning opportunities to students, faculty and researchers. MOOCs are now being offered in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) by a number of universities and institutions. This paper aims to explore how this new model of education can bring opportunities to LIS schools to overcome such constraints as lack of teachers, variable skills levels, paucity of funds and limited infrastructure, all of which can be significant barriers to effective delivery of LIS education. This paper will provide the first perspective from a developing country like India. It will explain the concept of MOOC and discuss its present role in LIS, and will explore its potential for collaboration in furthering teaching and research in this area. Design/methodology/approach A desk-based approach was used to study the philosophy behind MOOCs and its applicability in the field of LIS. However, a survey method was implemented to collect views of LIS professionals in India, to assess their understanding and interest in MOOCs. The scope of this study was limited to explaining how this new form of education can bring opportunities to LIS schools in India. Findings The study reveals great interest among Indian LIS professionals in further study through MOOCs, although the adoption of this learning method in Indian LIS schools is still a rarity. However, policy initiatives recently proposed by the Government of India will make it necessary for LIS schools to start experimenting with this new medium of education. Originality/value Some of the areas of collaboration discussed in this paper may enable LIS teachers and schools to adopt MOOCs to further LIS education and research, especially in developing countries.

The present study identifies the pattern of authorship and the collaboration in the field of Economics. Discusses the types of collaboration and describes measures of collaboration. The study gives the actual impact of collaboration intensity on the performance of scientific productivity in terms of Collaborative Index (which comes out to be 2.06), Degree of Collaboration (0.58), and Collaboration Coefficient (0.30). The paper concludes that the results are of significance for the policy makers in Economics research.

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Social networking services have become a very powerful tool to provide library services. Over a period of time libraries are using online social networking services to make their services popular and user friendly. Social networking services like facebook, youtube, twitter, linkedin, google+, instagram have many applications that could be utilised by the libraries to provide number of services in libraries. The paper reports the use of social networking services in University libraries, based on a study of 54 university websites in Karnataka state. Method of content analysis has been adopted to study the websites. The results indicate that 53 of 54 universities (98.14%) do have their own websites in different domains. 29.62% State/Central universities are connected to Facebook. 18.51% are connected to Youtube. Very few are connected to Twitter and Linkedin.18.51% of Universities are connected to different networking sites. It is observed that the universities libraries in the state are catching up with these technologies but many of these services are used for mere elementary purposes. The study concludes that it is time for the university libraries to exploit the services and use the optimum potentialities of these Social networking services.