PANAJI: The Goa University on Wednesday launched the website and Online Open Access Catalogue (OPAC) for its library, which will enable students and the public at large to look up titles of their interest from the over 1.40 lakh books and 400 journals at the click of a mouse. Users can now reserve and renew books using OPAC. Another 250 e-books are also available on the website and users will be able to download the ones of their interest onto their personal computer for future reference.
The website also enables university faculty to recommend books to readers on the website, which was inaugurated by chief minister, Manohar Parrikar, on Wednesday. Users can access all doctoral thesis submitted to prominent varsities in the country. Goa University will upload PhD thesis submitted to it on the website soon too.
"The website http:library.unigoa.ac.in uses an open source software KOHA. Users can login, search for titles using keywords and also find related titles in the search. Books can also be previewed by the readers. If users want to generally browse through the books available in thelibrary they can do it using the OPAC http:libcat.unigoa.ac.in on the website. The OPAC will soon be made available on mobile devices too," said university librarian Dr Gopakumar V, who has designed the website.
"Colleges affiliated to the Goa University are encouraged to create their own library websites. We plan to link these websites to ours so that a user can at a time search a book's availability in the libraries across Goa's institutions," Dr Gopakumar said.
The GU library's books cover a wide range of disciplines such as the humanities, social science and pure and applied sciences like microbiology, marine science, environmental science, computer science, geology and management. The library has a special collection on Latin America. It also has a large collection of titles in Konkani and the foreign language section includes titles in Portuguese, French and Spanish.
Users can either access these e-books from the comfort of their homes or through the 35 computers in the Goa University's Cyber Centre. The university campus has Wi-Fi connectivity which will enable students to access the website anywhere in the university campus on their laptops, if they do not want to be restricted within the computer laboratory of the university library to use the e-books.
The website is linked to full text databases like that of the American Chemical Society, Oxford University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry among others. One can also use the website to go to open access databases such as DOAJ, African Journals Online and Free Medical Journals.
Different language dictionaries, encyclopedias and formats for academic writing too are available on the website.
