READIT-2007 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

their scholars to post their articles on institutes digital libraries. Highwire Press maintains
largest open access archive of scientific and medical journals and Pubmed Central
maintains life science journal article access. There are subject repositories like arXiv.org
for Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology, NASA
Astrophysics Data System (ADS) for astronomy and astrophysics. NCSTRL provides
access to over 20,000 technical reports in computer science.
Search engines for scholarly information: There are several free search engines
like Google Scholar, Scirus, CiteSeer, and getCITED available which will index
scholarly literature. Some of these tools have functionality similar to subscription-based
tools like Scopus and Thomson ISI's Web of Science. Google Scholar provides links to
freely available literature on the web and also citation information.
Web 2.0 technologies and services: Second generation of web-based
communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs and
RSS are changing the way users collaboration and sharing and became very popular.
Wikipedia was started by Jimmy Wales in 2001 and now has more than 2.5 million
entries in 10 languages and became one of the popular sites. Now it extended to
Wikibooks, free open-source textbooks, and Wiktionary, an open-source dictionary,
among other creations.
3. IMPACT ON LIBRARIES
We can say today that users use Google or other services before coming to
Library. In the pre-internet world, librarians/libraries have central place in their
information requirements which now became one of the option for users in this internet
world. OCLC report, College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information
Resources, indicates that most undergraduates either do not visit their campus library or
do so only one or two times per year.
Pressures from funding institutions, reduction in budgets, operational and
financial performance measures increased use of internet by users are driving librarians to
promote, advertise and sell library services and move beyond from free services. Let us
look at the ways how these roles changed. To provide reference services, librarians
moved from searching the internal library collections and one or two paid databases to
online databases, hundreds of journals, online catalogs of other libraries and vast worldwide
web. Availability of new tools, better access made reference queries complex.
People are finding simple information using websites and databases provided on their
computers, for example; price of a book, address of a company and so on. Earlier
librarians tend to provide subject bibliographies or reading lists to users. Now they started
creating WebPages with links of sites that user’s can use. Internet made sharing of
cataloging of data easier and also ability to create different catalogs for different kind of
audience. In this internet world, where knowledge is treated as commodity and priced,
Libraries can change their paths and play important role in few areas. Given below are
some of the ways for the same:
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