DIGITAL RESOURCE BUILDING AND ONLINE SERVICES : AN EXPERIENCE AT ELECTRONIC LIBRARY, I.I.T. KHARAGPUR.

Abstract

Digital resource building , Intranet online services and Internet browsing are gaining momentum in technical library services during last few years in order to supplement the modern library services, specifically in the area of research and development activities in different parts of our country, and so is the case with Central Library of Indian Institute Of Technology (I.I.T) at Kharagpur. I.I.T. Kharagpur, being a premier, large and diversified technical institute in the field of science and technology, is always at the fore front of adopting modern practices for providing new kind of services to its community. Annexing Electronic Library (EL) in the year 1995, Central Library , I.I.T. Kharagpur , since then in a continuous process, started acquiring various digitized commercial databases and also applied all other possible means to build up its digitized document collection and services thereof. This paper presents an image of experiences gathered by the ‘Author’ in augmenting digitized resources and making newer services available thereof to meet the changing needs of the users, focusing on computer based literature search services, electronic SDI, and the like. Author, being an experienced library professional, starts this paper with an introduction to a panoramic view of to-day’s library system. He, proceeds further to give a brief account of traditional library services, followed by ,the salient features of the Electronic Library at I.I.T. Kharagpur including collection of digital resources in their stock, unfolding the scope and coverage in each case, such as source of origin, the search and retrieval software, the vendor details, cost of the database and the computer platform used . Further to this ‘Author’ tries to give reference to the in-house digitized information creation by way of Homepage development and its world wide accessibility through Internet ; creation of web documents through MHRD(Ministry of Human Resource Development) project grant (i.e Archives on Technical Education) . Finally ‘Author’ concludes this paper with his optimistic idea of emergence of hybrid library system in coming days to maintain parallel collection of documents both in print media as well as in digitized format to supplement and complement the gap in formation need of the users at large.