Affiliated colleges have so far shown tepid response to the opportunity created by Bharathidasan University through its library to access NLIST (National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content) resources constituting thousands of text and reference books at graduate, postgraduate and research levels, in addition to 3,000 scholarly journals.
By networking at regional, national and international level, the library is able to provide affiliated colleges access to enormous scholarly information through inter-library loan and online document delivery service, on payment of a registration cost of just Rs.5,000 to the INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network) director. According to Vice Chancellor K. Meena only 23 colleges have registered so far despite repeated requests to principals.
The university library, she informed, would network bibliographic databases of its own documents and those of affiliated colleges, and provide the user community online access to catalogues. The university plans to conduct an awareness programme and a workshop on accessing and using scholarly information resources and systems in collaboration with INFLIBNET, DELNET (Developing Library Network), and other information agencies.
The initiative, said Srinivasa Ragavan, librarian and head, university library, would bridge the gap between the resource-rich libraries and smaller ones in colleges where the budget for books is less.
Meanwhile, Bharathidasan University has signed an MoU with INFLIBNET and is one among 25 universities in the country to receive UGC sanction of Rs.11.5 lakh (second largest) in first phase for digitisation of all submitted Ph.D theses.
This would pave way for students, scholars and teachers to seamlessly access full text theses and approved synopsis of Ph.D. programmes of various subjects through the university website.
A press release said the university has sustained its fifth rank position at national level for the fourth consecutive year for using scholarly resources through UGC Infonet e-resources consortia.
During 2011, the university faculty and students downloaded 5,40,571 research articles and book chapters for academic and research information needs, compared to 2,94,338 the previous year. By virtue of subscribing to Springer e-books, Scopus, India stat, and other databases, the university has over 1.5 lakh downloads of journal articles and e-book chapters.
Referring to the Web of Science, the global indexing database for scholarly research, the release said Bharathidasan University research index has received a global citation score of 18000.
With h-index ranking of 51 (3rd rank in the State), the score of 7.62, as average citation per article, propped the university to second rank in the State as on June 15, 2012.
