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Prof. Varada Rajakumar Ratnam

The use of e-journals by engineering colleges is still largely restricted. A look at issues of concern.

The explosive growth of the Internet and the availability of powerful servers have revolutionised information technology and related services. Virtually everything is now instantly available on a computer, personal digital assistant or cell-phone.

This very explosion of available information has, however, made it very difficult to extract a wanted piece of information from the background noise, because there is no control on the authenticity of hosted material.

But since there is no such authentication problem in the case of refereed e-journals and reputed information databases, these are not only very useful but have also become a necessity in many professions.

In the area of education, e-journals/books have become more popular than their hard copies, especially in engineering, science and management programmes.

About a decade ago, online resource usage was almost nonexistent in our country. Thanks to the ERNET programme of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the Indian Institute of Science and the IITs were networked to provide high-speed access to the intranet, the Internet, e-mail and file transfer (ftp) services.

E-journal use was still very restricted. Till 2000, digital library activity, even in premier institutions, was confined to the use of a negligible fraction of journals, by subscription, and, in addition, some free online access bundled by journals with subscriptions to their hard copy version.

One reason for this was that while institutes such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), which is a non-profit making body committed to the propagation of Electrical engineering knowledge, adopted a pricing policy for its publications and, online too, which makes subscription affordable, this is not true in the case of most publishers, many of whom apply hard copy type of prices to e-journals as well!

Digital library consortia

That very year, the idea of bringing the libraries of the Indian Institute of Science and the IITs together for joint subscription of print and online journals originated in institutes such as the IIT, Kharagpur and IIT, Delhi. The efforts on the proposal, for which I had the privilege of being one of the drivers, took shape and an Expert Committee was established by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) for formulating a road map.

Shortly thereafter, the "Indian National Digital Library in Engineering Sciences and Technology (INDEST) Consortium" was established. Members of this consortium included not only the Indian Institute of Science and IITs, but also the IIMs and the other National Institutes run directly by MHRD as members. More than 6,000 journals were made available to the IITs and a proportionate number for the IIMs, with full funding from the MHRD.

E-journal access statistics rose phenomenally and the culture of electronic browsing got set in within a few months of the beginning itself. Since an excellent research culture based on intensive use of print journals already existed in these institutions, e-journal access statistics rose, practically from day one.

Subsequently, many other universities/institutes under the All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) umbrella, including some privately-owned institutions, joined the consortium with the support of the AICTE.

But the bulk of engineering institutions, particularly those owned by private managements, still do not avail of this facility. Many of them simply lack the intranet infrastructure and the Internet access capacity required for e-journal access. Nor, for that matter, do they have any research culture worth the name.

As a consequence, today even many B.Tech theses in the country are completed without consultation of research papers from reputed international journals.

The premier institutions now have access to more than 10,000 e-journals, Conference proceedings and standards under this consortium.

The Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)/Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) Electronic Library (IEL) full text, Elsevier's Science Direct, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), ProQuest and EBSCO are some of the reputed databases that are subscribed under INDEST.

The UGC-INFONET, an e-journal consortium established in 2003 under the INFLIBNET, has also emerged as another active consortium mainly to cater to the digital library needs of the universities.

However, because of the limitations mentioned above, active usage of these services, too, is limited to only some universities.

Improving the connectivity of institutions, revision of pricing policies of e-journals by publishers, creation of a proper policy on the usage of journal archives, and the archiving of research output by institutions are some of the issues that need immediate attention.

(The author is a Professor in the Dept of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering at IIT, Kharagpur.)

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