7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

3. Agricultural Library Resource Sharing
The serial crisis is a big problem for most of the Indian agricultural libraries. Many journal
prices are increasing at a rate well over general inflation. The fluctuation dollar and other
foreign currencies take its toll one hand and on the other hand the budgets of agricultural
libraries have sustained deep cuts and there is really a crisis. In this regard, the crisis has to
be seen as an issue of under funding as much as of over pricing of serials (Steele, 2004).
But, it is mandate for the agricultural libraries to disseminate agricultural information to the
students and researchers in agriculture to augment agricultural production of the country. It
is necessary to provide latest information to the agricultural science educators, researchers
and extension professionals. The main sources of information of these groups are research
papers published in the scientific serial literature and conference proceedings. Therefore,
agricultural libraries in India are subscribing to a number of national and international
journals to cater to the information needs of the agricultural students and researchers. But,
resource sharing among these libraries is limited which can help the libraries to ensure
judicious spending on journals by avoiding duplication of journals, which are available in
neighbor libraries.
In this context, it is important to note that International journals do not widely cover areas
that address research problems related to Indian conditions. Localized agricultural and
environmental issues and their research solutions have sparse coverage in the international
journals (Bhattacharya, 2004). So it is necessary to ensure access to the Indian journals
along with international journals to all students and researchers in the fields of agricultural
sciences. Under the circumstances stated, library resource sharing seems to be the only way
in the present environment of financial stringency to meet the demands of teachers,
researchers and extension professionals in the fields of agricultural sciences. Further, there
is no web portal for agricultural science students and researchers of India, which can
provide single point access to the important web resources in agricultural sciences. The
holding details of back volumes of journals available in various agricultural university and
college libraries need to be brought to the knowledge of the agricultural science students
and researchers and extension workers who are working in the width and breadth of the
country.
4. Web Portal
Technically, a portal is a network service that brings together content from diverse
distributed resources using technologies such as cross-searching, harvesting, and alerting,
and collates this into an amalgamated form for presentation to the users and this
presentation is usually via a web browser, though other means are also possible’. For users,
a portal is a, possibly personalized, single point of access where searching can be carried
out across one or more than one resource and the amalgamated results viewed. (Butters,
2003). The ideal library portal should have the most thorough coverage possible in several
areas of the profession. The purpose of any library portal is to direct the user to specific
information sources amongst the vast mass (O’Leary, 2000).
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