Tapping the e-word

Tapping the e-word, Varada Rajakumar Ratnam, Prof Electronic and Electrical communication Engineering at IIT, Kharagpur says "The use of e-journals by engineering colleges is still largely restricted. A look at issues of concern"

Improving the connectivity of institutions, revision of pricing policies of e-journals by publishers, creation of a proper policy on the usage of journal archives, and the archiving of research output by institutions are some of the issues that need immediate attention.

Thanks to the ERNET programme of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the Indian Institute of Science and the IITs were networked to provide high-speed access to the intranet, the Internet, e-mail and file transfer (ftp) services.

E-journal use was still very restricted. Till 2000, digital library activity, even in premier institutions, was confined to the use of a negligible fraction of journals, by subscription, and, in addition, some free online access bundled by journals with subscriptions to their hard copy version.

One reason for this was that while institutes such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), which is a non-profit making body committed to the propagation of Electrical engineering knowledge, adopted a pricing policy for its publications and, online too, which makes subscription affordable, this is not true in the case of most publishers, many of whom apply hard copy type of prices to e-journals as well! ...

[After the launch of] the "Indian National Digital Library in Engineering Sciences and Technology (INDEST) Consortium"...E-journal access statistics rose phenomenally and the culture of electronic browsing got set in...

Subsequently, many other universities/institutes under the All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) umbrella, including some privately-owned institutions, joined the consortium with the support of the AICTE.

But the bulk of engineering institutions, particularly those owned by private managements, still do not avail of this facility....As a consequence, today even many B.Tech theses in the country are completed without consultation of research papers from reputed international journals.

The premier institutions now have access to more than 10,000 e-journals, Conference proceedings and standards under this consortium....

The UGC-INFONET, an e-journal consortium established in 2003 under the INFLIBNET, has also emerged as another active consortium mainly to cater to the digital library needs of the universities....

Via...The Hindu Business Line, dated 09th Oct'2006