Library consortia in India with special reference to UGC-Infonet digital library consortium

Abstract

Including scholarly contents has given right to the publishers of peer-reviewed journals to keep higher subscription rates. It always affects library budget to a great extent. Since long libraries have been experimenting different ways of library cooperation so that maximum benefit, especially economic benefit, could be extracted from their joint cooperation ventures. The term 'consortia' has been considered an advanced stage of library cooperation. Advent of electronic journals has given rise to homogonous libraries and national governments to cope with scarcity of funds and unavailability of internationally produced scholarly literature by means of establishing library consortia. Various library consortia have been mushroomed all across the world and India has also not been spared from it. University Grants Commission (UGC) observed the dire state of Indian university libraries and found that only few were subscribing to some International peer-reviewed journals and many were not even subscribing to any international journal. The UGC opted electronic journals as medium and initiated a national consortium for strengthening library collection by providing thousands of international peer-reviewed journals over Internet free of cost. The consortium is known as UGC-Infonet Digital Library consortium. In this paper an effort is being made to discuss the various concepts of library consortia in India briefly and UGC-Infonet Digital Library consortium in detail. ª

Proposing a Library Consortium Model for National Development in Zimbabwe

“…Goudar (2013) argues that development of library consortia in India was precipitated by the escalating prices of journals, the geometric growth of scholarly publishing and uncertain foreign exchange rates that put already shrinking budgets of Indian libraries in steep decline. In an endeavor to support research activities throughout the country and to avoid duplication of activities, the government of India launched a national information system called the National Information System for Science and Technology (NISSAT) in 1977 (Chauhan & Mahajan, 2013). NISSAT supported and sponsored resource-sharing activities by establishing library networks and consortia in India.…”

Cooperation between Learning Resource Centers at Colleges of Applied Sciences, Oman

“…Cooperation between the members is consistent with higher corporate objectives and values. Chauhan and Mahajan (2013) concluded that supervision of cooperation between institutions by one administrative entity is much easier than management of such cooperation by more than one administrative entity as in the former case a higher entity imposes legislations and laws governing the cooperative program and these become binding to the members.…”

A selective review of research on e‐resource usage in academic libraries

“…Their study showed the need for training the scholars in the use of e‐journals. Another study identifies the limitations and problems for low usage of these e‐resources at the Himachal Pradesh University and offers some suggestions to improve the usage (Chauhan et al , 2011). Swain and Panda (2009) have reported that e‐resources are used more as compared to CDROM databases by the faculty members of business schools in Orissa and Google and Yahoo are the most frequently used search engines.…”