Thursday, January 1, 2015

Library Consortium: UGC INFONET Digital Library, with reference to NLIST P- 04. Information Communication Technology for Libraries

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

Library Consortium: UGC INFONET Digital Library, with reference to NLIST


P- 04. Information Communication Technology for Libraries *

By :Usha Munshi,Paper Coordinator

Multiple Choice Question

1 / 1 Points

Question 1: Multiple Choice

In 2002, INFLIBNET started providing internet access to universities in its programme named _______.
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked NLIST
  • Correct Answer Checked UGC-INFONET
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked SOUL
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked ERNET
0 / 1 Points

Question 2: Multiple Choice

The access to e-resources available under the Consortium is accessible using
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Campus IP Addresses
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Shibboleth
  • Wrong Answer Checked Off-campus access using Ezproxy
  •  Un-checked All the above
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked None of these
0 / 1 Points

Question 3: Multiple Choice

The core members of INFLIBNET includes
  •  Un-checked Universities
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked IITs
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Govt. Colleges
  • Wrong Answer Checked All the above
1 / 1 Points

Question 4: Multiple Choice

The core membership of UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium is available for
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Private Universities
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Central Universities
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Universities covered under section 12 B of UGC
  • Correct Answer Checked Both B & C
1 / 1 Points

Question 5: Multiple Choice

The major aims and objective of UGC-INFONET Digital library Consortium are:
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked to provide access to a high-quality and scholarly electronic resources to a large number of academic institutions
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked to promote use of e-e-resources
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked to increase the research productivity of the institutions
  • Correct Answer Checked All the above
1 / 1 Points

Question 6: Multiple Choice

The major terms of negotiation for subscription of e-resources under UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium are
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Simultaneous Users
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Print-Independent Subscription
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Perpetual Access
  • Correct Answer Checked All the above
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Only A and B
0 / 1 Points

Question 7: Multiple Choice

The standard/protocol for automated usage statistics retrieval is
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked COUNTER
  •  Un-checked SUSHI
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked KBART
  • Wrong Answer Checked OpenURL
0 / 1 Points

Question 8: Multiple Choice

The UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium promotes inter-library loan through
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Web of Science
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked Science Direct
  •  Un-checked JCCC
  • Wrong Answer Checked None of the above
0 / 1 Points

Question 9: Multiple Choice

UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium is funded by ____________.
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked AICTE
  • Wrong Answer Checked MHRD
  •  Un-checked UGC
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked CSIR
1 / 1 Points

Question 10: Multiple Choice

UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium was launched in the year _____.
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked 2002
  • Correct Answer Checked 2003
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked 2005
  • Wrong Answer Un-checked 2007
5 / 10 PointsFinal ScorE

True or False

1 / 1 Points

Question 1: True or False

The UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium is being operated by the INFLIBNET Centre under the overall guidance of a National Negotiation Committee.
 Un-checked True
Correct Answer Checked False
1 / 1 PointsFinal Score:

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2. Introduction

The emergence of Internet created a new mode for information delivery through full-text online resources and online bibliographic databases. With the emergence of new mode of faster and easy availability of global resources, libraries felt much pressure to subscribe to larger web-based resources with limited budgets. This resulted in creation of Consortia-based subscription. In this new information environment, the University Grants Commission (UGC) initiated two ambitious programme to bridge the digital divide in the university sector in India by providing access to scholarly electronic resources irrespective of its geographic location. The first initiative, namely “UGC-Infonet Connectivity Programme” provides for networking of university campuses with state-of-the-art campus wide networks and Internet bandwidth, the second initiative called the “UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium” provides access to selected scholarly electronic journals and databases in different disciplines. The INFLIBNET is responsible for execution and monitoring of both these initiatives.

2.1. UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium

The UGC INFONET Digital Library Consortium is major initiative of University Grants Commission (UGC) to bring qualitative change in academic libraries in India. It was formally launched in December, 2003 by Honourable Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam, the then President of India, soon after providing the Internet connectivity to the universities in the year 2003 under the UGC-Infonet programme. It is a national initiative for providing access to scholarly electronic resources including full-text and bibliographic databases in all subject disciplines to academic community in India. It facilitates access to high quality e-resources to academia in the country to improve teaching, learning and research.
Access to about 4000 scholarly journals and databases are made available to 100 universities. The access to various e-journals started from January 1, 2004.

2.1.1. UGC-INFONET Connectivity Programme

The UGC-INFONET Connectivity Programme was launched to provide Internet bandwidth, a pre-requisite for delivery of scholarly content subscribed through the UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium.  Under the UGC-INFONET Connectivity Programme, the UGC facilitates modernization of university campuses with state-of-the-art campus wide networks and has set up its own nationwide communication network named UGC-INFONET with INFLIBNET as its executing and coordinating agency. The scheme was inaugurated by the then Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee with the commencement of UGC’s Golden Jubilee celebrations on 25th December, 2002. The UGC had signed an MoU with the Education and Research Network (ERNET) India in April 2002 for providing Internet connectivity to all universities covered under 12 B Act of the UGC. The INFLIBNET, as an IUC of the UGC, acts as a coordinating agency for monitoring the network and Internet bandwidth provided to the universities under the scheme and liaisons between ISP and universities. The UGC has constituted a Central Connectivity Monitoring Committee(CCMC) for monitoring the activities of the UGC-INFONET Connectivity programme. The Network was switched to BSNL backbone with upgraded network infrastructure to connect Universities with 10 Mbps(1:1) Internet Bandwidth from 1st April 2010 and renamed as UGC Infonet 2.0.

With the launch of National Knowledge Network, the programme has now been withdrawn and all universities are migrated to NKN/NME-ICT project.


2.1.2. Current Status of UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium


The UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium provides current as well as archival access to more than 8,500+ core and peer-reviewed electronic journals and eleven bibliographic databases from 28 publishers including university presses, scholarly societies, commercial publishers and aggregators in different disciplines. 202 universities and 14 national law schools / universities including all the 5 IUCs of the UGC are being provided differential access to subscribed e-resources. More than 204+ private universities and other institutions have joined the Associate Membership Programme of the Consortium to get access to e-resources subscribed under the Consortium. The list of full-text e-resources subscribed under the Consortium are listed below: 

Sl. No.
Name of Publisher
URL
No of Journals
1
American Chemical Society
http://pubs.acs.org/
37
2
American Institute of  Physics**
http://journals.aip.org/
18
3
American Physical Society
http://publish.aps.org/browse.php
10
4
Annual Reviews
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/
33
5
Wiley-Blackwell Publishing
908
6
Cambridge University Press
http://journals.cambridge.org/
224
7
Science Direct (10 Subject Collections) **
http://www.sciencedirect.com/
1036
8
Economic & Political Weekly
http://epw.in/
1
9
Emerald – Lib. Sci. Collection
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/
29
10
Institute of Physics
http:// iopscience.iop.org /
46
11
JSTOR
http://www.jstor.org/
2500+
12
Nature**
http://www.nature.com/
1
13
Oxford University Press**
http://www.oxfordjournals.org
206
14
Portland Press
7
15
Project Euclid
http://projecteuclid.org/
35
16
Project Muse
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals
493
17
Royal Society of Chemistry**
29
18
SIAM Journals**
http://epubs.siam.org/
14
19
Springer Link
http://www.springerlink.com/
1763
20
Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com/
1079
** Purchased the archive of the journals

The consortium also purchased the back-files for some e-resources for selected universities which provides the access from volume 1, issue 1 of the journals. The consortium also subscribes to bibliographic databases and 3 legal databases as listed below:
Sl. No.
Bibliographic Databases
URL
1
JCCC
http://jgateplus.com/search
2
MathSciNet
http://www.ams.org/mathscinet
3
ISID
http://isid.org.in/
4
SciFinder Scholar
http://www.cas.org/
5
RSC Databases(6)
http://www.rsc.org/
6
Web of Science (Access through NLIST Programme)
http://isiknowledge.com/
 
Legal Databases ^
 
7
HeinOnline
http://home.heinonline.org/
8
Manupatra
http://www.manupatra.com/
9
Westlaw India
http://www.westlawindia.com/


2.1.3. Aims and Objectives of UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium

The main objective of the UGC INFONET Digital Library Consortium is to provide access to qualitative electronic resources including full-text and bibliographic databases to academic institutions at a lower rates of subscription. The major aims and objectives of the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium are as follows ,[ii]:
  • to provide access to a high-quality and scholarly electronic resources to a large number of academic institutions including universities and colleges at substantially lower rates of subscription and at most favourable terms and conditions;
  • to promote rapid and efficient access to scholarly content to the users and to create and promote use of ICT in teaching and learning in universities in India;
  • to extend the benefit of Consortium to its associate members including private universities and colleges;
  • to impart training to the users, librarians, research scholars and faculty members of the institutions in use of electronic resources with an aim to optimize their usage;
  • to promote use of e-e-resources with gradual decrease in print subscription;
  • to promote interaction and inter-library cooperation amongst the participating universities;
  • to evaluate the usage of the subscribed resources and to identify new resources that are required to be subscribed under the programme;
  • to bring qualitative change in teaching, learning and research with an aim to meet the ever growing challenges of globalization of higher education; and
  • to increase the research productivity of the institutions both in terms of quality and quantity of publications.

2.1.4. Benefits

The Major benefits of UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium are as follows:
  • The Consortium acts as a single-window service for a large number of universities with their diverse research and academic interest;
  • The Consortium, with its collective strength of participating institutions, attracts highly discounted rates of subscription with most favourable terms of agreement for a wider range of e-resources. Most of the e-publishers have responded positively to the call of the Consortium. The rates offered to the consortium are lower by 60% to 99% depending upon the category of institutions;
  • Users have immediate access to material previously not subscribed to, at no incremental cost for accessing back files;
  • It improves the existing library services and reduce the subscription cost;
  • The research productivity of beneficiary institutions is expected to improve with increased access to international databases and full-text resources;
  • The Consortium is expected to trigger remarkable increase in sharing of both print and electronic resources amongst participating library through J-GATE Custom Contents for Consortia (JCCC);
  • The Consortium has been opened-up for all other universities / educational institutions through its “Associate Membership Programme”. Private universities and other institutions can join the Consortium and get the benefit of not only highly discounted rates of subscription but also the favourable terms and conditions;
  • Members of the Consortium have the benefit of cap on the annual increase in the rates of subscription. While the usual increase in price of e-resources vary from 15 to 20%, the consortium enjoys the cap on increase in price ranging from 5% to 8%;
  • The Consortium is offered better terms of agreement for use, archival access and preservation of subscribed electronic resources, which would not have been possible for any single institutions; and
  • Since the subscribed resources is accessible online in electronic format, the beneficiary institutions have less pressure on space requirement for storing and managing print-based library resources. Moreover, all problems associated with print media such as their wear and tear, location, shelving, binding, organizing, etc. are not an issue for electronic resources.

2.1.5. Subject Coverage


The consortium subscribes to e-resources that cover all major subject areas taught in Indian Universities. The major subject areas include Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Physical and Chemical Sciences, Life Sciences, Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics etc. It includes wide variety of materials e.g. e-journals, bibliographic databases, reviews published by scholarly societies, university presses, institutional and commercial publishers.
The resources subscribed by the Consortium can broadly be divided into the following two categories:

a)                  Full-text Electronic Resources
Full-text electronic resources contain complete articles along with their bibliographic details. The consortium subscribes to full-text e-resources from scholarly societies (American Chemical Society, American Institute of Physics, Institute of Physics, Royal Society of Chemistry etc), university presses (Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press), commercial publishers (Elsevier ScienceDirect, Springer Link, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell) and aggregators like JSTOR, Project Muse, Project Euclid, etc. All full-text resources subscribed by the Consortium contain electronic journals which provides access to current journals as well as back-files access of the journals. The access to back-files is available for 10-15 years in most cases. In some cases (American chemical Society, Institute of Physics etc.) the access to back-files is available from the vol 1 of the journals. The consortium has also purchased archives of some publishers for which the back-files access was not available and the access has been provided to selected universities distributed at various geographical locations.

b)                 Bibliographic Databases
Bibliographic databases contain references to articles published in journals, conference proceedings or chapters in books. Most bibliographic databases contain abstracts of the articles along with links to their full-text. The consortium subscribes to major bibliographic databases like SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts Services), MathSciNet. 


2.1.6. Operation of UGC-INFONET DLC

The UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium is being operated by the INFLIBNET Centre under the overall guidance of a National Steering Committee that guides and steers the activities of the Consortium. The National Steering Committee is responsible for operational aspects of the Consortium. The Committee decides on e-resources to be subscribed from various publishers and numbers and names of beneficiary universities. The National Steering Committee (NSC) constituted by UGC with representatives from various stakeholders of the Consortium as below:
  • Chairman: An Expert in IT / Library and Information Science to be appointed by the UGC in consultation with the Chairman, INFLIBNET Centre
  • Joint Secretary (IUC), UGC
  • One Member of the Governing Body, INFLIBNET
  • One Nominee from one Central University
  • One Nominee from one State University
  • One Nominee from a University in North Eastern Region
  • One Nominee from the IUCs of UGC
  • One Nominee from IITs / IISc / Institutions of higher learning
  • Coordinator, CSIR E-Journals Consortium
  • National Coordinator, INDEST-AICTE Consortium
  • Convener: Director, INFLIBNET Centre (Ex-officio)
The National Steering Committee also allocates resources to the universities based on following criteria:
  • Availability of ICT infrastructure in universities
  • Number of students enrolled at UG, PG and doctoral level
  • Number and nature of academic programmes offered at PG and doctoral level
  • Number of Departments, Centre, Schools, Faculty, Research Scholars and PG Students
  • Type of university: Central. State, Deemed to be universities
  • Research output / publication in peer reviewed journals
A Negotiation Committee is constituted by the Governing Body of the INFLIBNET Centre as per the purchase rules of the Centre for negotiating rates of subscription to e-resources based on the recommendations of the National Steering Committee.

2.1.6.1. Member Institutions

Based on the subscription of e-resources and funding pattern, the eligible members can be grouped into Core members and Associate members.
a)     Core Members
The core members are the members for which the subscription to e-resources has been made by the INFLIBNET Centre and the subscription fees is wholly funded by the UGC. All universities covered under Section 12B of the UGC Act, 1956 are eligible to get access to e-resources through the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium. The consortium also includes the Central Universities, National law schools/universities and Inter University Centres of the UGC. The universities are broadly categorized into 3 phases based on the number of students enrolled and their levels (UG, PG, Doctoral), number and nature of academic programmes offered, research orientation, teaching orientation and availability of ICT infrastructure.

In Phase I, fifty universities were selected to provide access to e-resources offered under UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium in the year 2004. The first set of 50 universities was selected after ensuring availability of network infrastructure for accessing e-resources based on static IP provided through the UGC-INFONET Connectivity Programme. These universities were selected based on certain criteria, viz. existing network infrastructure, number of scientific research, no of students enrolled and Internet connectivity in the campus. These universities have advantage of getting access to all major e-resources subscribed under Consortium.

Additional 50 universities that were given the network infrastructure under the UGCINFONET Programme in the year 2005 were given access to selected e-resources in Phase II under the Consortium initiatives. Compare to universities covered under Phase I, universities in Phase II have lesser number of students, academic programmes and inadequate ICT infrastructure. Phase II universities have access to most e-resources except a few.

Phase III universities include smaller universities and specialized institutions including IUCs. Several Phase III universities do not require access to full-text e-resources in science and technology since these universities / institutions offer specialized courses. Universities / institutions covered in Phase III include, Tata Institute of Social Science, Central Institute of English and Foreign Language, Gokhale Institute of Political and Economics, Sanskrit and Urdu universities. Phase III universities have access to very few selected e-resources.

Other than above 3 phases, the consortium include national legal schools/universities which are provided the access to specialized e-resources in the area of Legal studies.

b)       Associate Membership
The Associate Membership programme for the UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium provides subscription of e-resources to private universities and other academic institutions at highly discounted rates of subscription and better terms and conditions of subscription. Under the programme, private universities and other institutions are enrolled as Associate Member of the Consortium and subscribe to e-resources of their choice available through the Consortium. The rates of subscription for all the resources are same as applicable to the core members of the Consortium, i.e. universities covered under 12 B Act of the UGC. Associate Membership Programme has been well-received by the private universities and other academic institutions. A number of private universities and academic institutions  and government funded institutions have joined as Associate member of the Consortium.

2.1.6.2. Selection of E-resources

The e-resources subscribed under the consortium were selected keeping in view the diversity of academic programmes offered by various universities. All e-resources were evaluated for their i) qualitative and quantitative contents; ii) coverage; iii) their availability on different platforms and their comparative advantages / disadvantages; and iv) rates applicable for these resources to individual institutions as well as to other consortia. The electronic resources proposed for consortia-based subscription were selected based on the following major criteria:

  • Resources from scholarly societies, university presses and not-for-profit projects were preferred over commercial publishers;
  • Well-established multi-disciplinary resources with broad coverage were preferred over highly specialized sources targeted for specialists;
  • Electronic resources already on subscription in the beneficiary universities were preferred over those which are not being used in any of them;
  • Resources that are very important but highly cost-intensive were preferred over those which are less important or less-used but low cost;
  • Selections were made on usage / suitability of e-resources to universities.

2.1.6.3. Access Mechanism

All electronic resources subscribed through the UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium are made accessible from the publisher’s Website. The access to electronic resources is IP-enabled for the member universities. As such a user does not require “Login ID and Password” to access resources available to his / her university, instead, the resources are accessible to them anywhere on their Campus network. Most universities provide links to such resources through their website.

The access to all the electronic resources subscribed through the Consortium can also be provided to the individual users (including students, researchers, staff and faculty) from of the member institutions/universities outside the campus of the university through proxy servers. Individual institutions can set-up proxy servers or any other similar remote authentication mechanism, deploying appropriate authorization and authentication mechanism for providing off-campus access to the electronic resources.

The INFLIBNET Centre is working towards implementation of Shibboleth which is the world's most widely deployed federated identity solutions, connecting users to applications both within and between organizations and available as open source. Shibboleth is an open-source project that provides Single Sign-On capabilities and allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner. However, implementation of Shibboleth is a time-consuming process requiring intensive software configuration, cooperation and collaboration amongst participating institutions, recognition of INFLIBNET as Identity Provider (IDP) and publishers as service provider (SP), etc.

The INLIBNET Centre maintains a web site especially for the Consortium for the benefit of its member institutions. The Web site provides details of e-resources, member institutions and resources subscribed by each one of them. The Consortium acts as a bridge between members, publishers and funding agencies.


2.1.6.4. Major Terms for Negotiation

The UGC-INFONET Digital Library consortium considers the following major terms of negotiation while subscribing to new e-resources:
  • Coverage of the Collection: total number of journals covered in a resource (Records in case of databases);
  • Journals offered: total number of journals offered in the proposal;
  • Simultaneous Users: There is no limit on number of simultaneous users on any of the resources subscribed by the Consortium. Any number of users can access e-resources including e-journals and bibliographic databases at any given time.
  • Walk-in Users: Walk-in users who are physically present at the subscribing university should also be allowed to use the resources.
  • Print-independent Subscription: Subscription to e-resources is print-independent. As such, beneficiary universities are free to drop subscription to print copy of journals accessible to them through the Consortium.
  • Inter-library Loan (ILL): Licensee is allowed to fulfill ILL requests from non-authorized users using print copy of article downloaded from the licensor's website.
  • Open Access Policy: Policy regarding permitting self-archiving of articles by authors through institutional repositories;
  • Usage Statistics: Publisher is required to submit 'COUNTER' compliant usage / statistics on number of downloads (both full-text and abstracts) in a given month, previous month and cumulative for one year.
  • Inclusion of Additional Titles: The publisher would provide access to new journal titles that are added during the contract period at no additional cost.
  • Electronic Link: Publisher may provide electronic links to the licensed materials from Licensee's webpage at journal level or at article level and publisher should provide help in doing so,
  • Perpetual Access and Archival Rights: In case of termination of the Agreement or on the expiry of the agreement, publisher would extend perpetual access to e-resources for the paid period of subscription along with their back-files offered during the subscription period. Alternatively, the publisher would provide full-text of e-resources with back  volumes (e-journals/e-databases) tor each year on prevalent formats, i.e., CD-ROM/DVD-ROM with the retrieval software for access on the network. In case of change in archival technology, the state-of-the-art archival technology shall be made available by the Licensor to subscribers at no extra cost for archival of full-text data of e-journals to higher version of technology. Provision for support of archiving through PORTICO, LOCKSS etc.
  • Awareness and Training: The publisher or its representative would conduct "Users Awareness Programme" on campuses of member universities at no-charge to the universities. The publisher would provide publicity material, brochures, posters and user-support materials in both print as well as on CD forms.
  • E-print Archive: Member universities would be allowed to download bibliographic records, abstracts and full-text articles published by their faculty, researchers, students and staff from publisher's site and import them in to their local database and Institutional Repositories.
  • Arbitration: All disputes arising under the Agreement shall be settled under the rules of the International Arbitration Court by one or more arbitrators in accordance with the said rules. The place of the arbitration shall be in New Delhi (India) and carried out in the English language.

2.1.7. Economics of UGC-Infonet E-Journals Consortium

The INFLIBNET Centre as the implementing and monitoring agency of UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium evaluates the e-resources subscribed under the consortium using the following metrics:

2.1.7.1. Usage of e-journals and e-databases

The INFLIBNET Centre gathers COUNTER compliant usage statistics from almost all the publishers that are subscribed under the Consortium. The Centre has developed a Usage Portal (InfiStats) for monitoring the usage  statistics of various e-resources provided to the member universities. The InfiStats uses the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol  standard  (ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2007) of National Information Standards Organization (NISO) which defines an automated request and response model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data utilizing a Web services framework. The InfiStats Portal imports the usage data from the publishers website through this automated process and the data is stored in INFLIBNET Database. The InfiStats interface provides title level COUNTER reports to member institutions so as to enable them to evaluate the usage of their institute and make effort to increase the usage of less popular e-resource. The Consortium also take decision on discontinuation of e-resources based on the usage statistics. 

2.1.7.2. Cost benefit Analysis

The “Cost Recovery” and “Average cost of article per download” can be used effectively to judge cost effectiveness of e-resources. These two factors reflect the intensity and frequency of usage of e-resources by member institutions in a Consortium.  The cost recovery factor is calculated by multiplying number of articles downloaded with the cost of a single article, if it is purchased directly from the publishers in the “pay-per-view model” or brought through ILL from any document delivery service. According to ALPSP survey, 78% of publishers surveyed offer pay-per-view or individual article purchase options. In the pay-per-view model, the cost of articles varies from publisher to publisher and average cost is $30 per article. Assuming that if the electronic resources were not available through the Consortium, articles downloaded from these resources by the member institutions would have been sourced on inter-library loan / document delivery services at a cost of US $ 15.00 per article (Average cost of article taken from a study conducted by the American Research Libraries). 

2.1.7.3. Cost Avoidance

Savings under UGC-Infonet is calculated in terms of difference between cost paid by the Consortium for member institutions and cost payable by individual universities in case they subscribed the same resources on their own. 

3.0 Conclusion

The UGC, through the INFLIBNET Centre, has bridged the scholarly information divide in higher education system through  the "UGC-lnfonet Digital Library Consortium", which provides access to selected scholarly electronic journals and databases in different disciplines. This  programme would certainly benefit the higher education system in India immensely. Providing access to e-resources to the faculty and researchers is not a purpose in itself. It is only a mean to trigger a stronger research and academic culture in the universities recipient of this benefit.  It has created a new research trend of electronic access to scholarly information amongst academic community and helped in strengthening higher education system in India. The access to e-resources would invariably make qualitative difference on research, learning, scholarly and R&D activities of faculty and researchers. The research output will definitely increase and contribute to the nation's development. The Consortium efforts should, therefore, lead to increase in productivity of scientific research output both in quality and quantity. Ensuring optimal use of electronic resources is one of the biggest concerns for the consortium that receives central funding from the Government.   Libraries and information professionals are required to play a proactive role in promoting usage of resources amongst faculty and researchers.

4.0 References

UGC-INFONET DLC Guidelines available at
  • http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/econ/guidelineforugcinfonetdlc.pdf
  • http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/infonet/index.php
  • http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/econ

•        Arora, J., and K. Trivedi. "UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium: Present Services and Future Endeavours." DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology 30.2 (2010): 15-25. Print.

•        Pradhan, D. R., A. K. Rai, and J. Arora. "Implications of SUSHI for Analysis of Usage Statistics of E-resources: A Case Study of UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium." Annals of Library and Information Studies (ALIS) 59.3 (2012): 187-93. Print.

•        INFLIBNET Annual Report 2004-05


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