READIT-2007 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

students, research scholars, faculty members and scientists as they facilitate them to
(i) search for a particular journal or newspaper article; (ii) full text book titles; (iii)
browse electronic resources by subject; (iv) access many full text journal and
newspaper articles both on and off-campus; (v) find good websites relevant to a
particular subject area, discipline, topic, etc.
Establishing an electronic library in the library is become possible only by
technology integration and Librarians are playing a pivotal role in design and
development of electronic libraries.
As far as the SAU libraries under this study are concerned, the TANUVAS,
ANGRAU and TNAU are subscribing electronic journals at present and the other five
libraries are yet to start subscribing e-journals. It is very important to note that the
TANUVAS ranks first in e-journal subscription with 81 titles. As far as the CD-ROM
databases and other CD-ROM products are concerned, all these libraries had
established a good collection and the details are furnished in Table – 6.
Table -6: CD-ROM databases/Products available in SAU Libraries
S.No. SAU CD-ROM databases CD-ROM Products
1 ANGRAU 5 -
2 KAU 16 203
3 KVAFSU 1 NA
4 SVVU 2 NA
5 TANUVAS 5 35
6 TNAU 2 -
7 UAS-B 4 NA
8 UAS-D 14 NA
NA = Not available
It has been observed that none of the above SAU library has acquired
electronic books under collection development. Though there are 40 SAUs in India
and 8 in South India, none of them put their OPAC in public domain which can
facilitate access through World Wide Web.
Though the subscription cost of print and e-journals are sky rocketing, there
are hundreds of open source full-text journals available on the Internet where a good
number of journals are of scholarly in content and peer reviewed. So, even there is no
sufficient financial support from the universities for e-journal subscription, the
librarians can compile the URLs of all open source e-journals and put it on the
library’s web site / OPAC to ensure optimum utilization of these valuable resources
by their clients.
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has taken a major
initiative in this regard through a World Bank funded project ‘National Agricultural
Innovation Project’ (NAIP) to form an e-journal consortia which is named as ‘CeRA
(Consortium for e-Resources for Agriculture). Under the consortia all the 40 State
Agricultural Universities, Central Agricultural University and major ICAR Institutes
functioning in India will be provided with access to e-journals and other scholar e-
contents.
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