UGC-Infonet E-Journals Consortium an Indian Model Bridging the Gap between Scholarly Information and End User

Abstract

Any educational system must have to depend on authentic, factual, fast and up to date information. Indian educational system is one of the largest in all over the world but due to financial limitations large number of libraries have not been able to subscribe to quite a good number of journals required for research and academic community, University libraries could play a major role to further improve the status of higher education system of India. After analyzing the situation the University Grants Commission initiated two important projects viz. UGC-Infonet providing connectivity to universities and UGC-Infonet, E-Journals Consortium to provide scholarly access to electronic journals and databases. Probably this is the golden era in the history of higher education system in India. The total program is funded by UGC and ERNET (Education and Research Network) has been entrusted to establish infrastructure within member universities on a turn key basis and the overall monitoring and execution of the project is being done by INFLIBNET. Through this program large number of e-resources subscribed and provided access to faculty and research scholars working in universities. To make people aware about the use of e-resources good number of user awareness training programs and also conducted 5 national seminars at five different places. Usage statistics provided by different publishers are also very interesting and encouraging.