Are Research Libraries in India prepared in Digital Age?

The steady growth of digital information (Lyman and Hal 2003) as a component of major research collections has significant implications for research libraries. The collection of digital resources as well as access through network by research libraries are increasing day by day. Digital Libraries (DLs) are broadly recognized as a key component in the Global Information Infrastructure (Borgman 2000) - a means of sharing information and knowledge between and among the research, business, government, and educational communities. But how far the research libraries in India adopted and adapting this new technology to realize the “anytime, anywhere” access to information of digital libraries? This article presents an overview of the difficulties facing by the research libraries in India as well as their roles in the present chaotic situation of managing more hybrid and distributed collection of both physical and digital materials

OPEN COURSEWARE: A NEW PARADIGM IN E-LEARNING

History has proved that education and discovery are best advanced when knowledge is shared openly. Open Courseware (OCW) is a part of a comparatively new educational movement in the line of Open access and also an opportunity in the field of distance/elearning that leading institutions and universities around the world can capitalize for the betterment of the society. Great Universities and institutions constantly expand their reach, working across traditional boundaries to grasp and meet the global community’s most critical needs. Already world famous institutes like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) are working along this way that will automatically inspire other institutions to openly share their course materials for open dissemination of knowledge and information that can open new doors to the benefits of education for humanity around the world. India is a vast country with different culture and languages. In this paper we studied different aspects of OCW and its impact on total learning proce

Open Access: What Scientists Think? A survey of researcher's attitude towards Open Access

The Internet has changed how we conduct and share research, primarily by increasing the global reach of scholarly communication. Today the world of information is divided between two views on costs and business. One group believes that content should be freely accessible for the development of further knowledge. The other group believes that content should be maintained by market value for quality products and incentives to the intellectual content. Open Access (OA) has come from the growing interest of researchers in experimenting with innovative mechanisms to disseminate their research findings. However OA is still far behind what it should be in the country like India. At least the scientific community is still in a dilemma to embrace OA. This is what we find in our survey of researcher's attitude towards OA. There are many reasons ranging from lack of awareness, myths about OA and biasness towards traditional publishing model for prestige & recognition. We approached scientists of different research institutes and universities around Kolkata with different age groups in different ways. Interesting results have come out which clearly identified the major hurdles to adopt OA by scientific community in India. Keywords: Open Access, Scholarly Publications, Journal Publisher, Citation and Impact Factor, Research Impact, Open Access Initiative, Institutional Repositories and Usability Study

Where we stand? A scientometric mapping of Indian Science & Technology research in some major research areas

Contribution of research output in the field of Science & Technology by Indian researchers covered in Web of Science database is compared with other most productive countries for different research areas. This paper analyses the research activity of Indian scientists in terms of total number of publication, global share, share of international collaborative publications and visibility & citation impact for the period 2009-2014. The trend of research output in key research areas clearly indicates that all productive countries have their own strength and weaknesses in different research areas. India is steadily emerging as a potential contender in science & technology research in major research areas. Also South Korea, Taiwan and Iran from Asia subcontinent are progressing and they are among twelve most productive countries in some of the key research areas considered in this paper

OPEN COURSEWARE: A NEW PARADIGM IN E-LEARNING

History has proved that education and discovery are best advanced when knowledge is shared openly. Open Courseware (OCW) is a part of a comparatively new educational movement in the line of Open access and also an opportunity in the field of distance/elearning that leading institutions and universities around the world can capitalize for the betterment of the society. Great Universities and institutions constantly expand their reach, working across traditional boundaries to grasp and meet the global community’s most critical needs. Already world famous institutes like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) are working along this way that will automatically inspire other institutions to openly share their course materials for open dissemination of knowledge and information that can open new doors to the benefits of education for humanity around the world. India is a vast country with different culture and languages. In this paper we studied different aspects of OCW and its impact on total learning processMizoram Universit

Open Access: What Scientists Think?

The Internet has changed how we conduct and share research, primarily by increasing the global reach of scholarly communication. Today the world of information is divided between two views on costs and business. One group believes that content should be freely accessible for the development of further knowledge. The other group believes that content should be maintained by market value for quality products and incentives to the intellectual content. Open Access (OA) has come from the growing interest of researchers in experimenting with innovative mechanisms to disseminate their research findings. However OA is still far behind what it should be in the country like India. At least the scientific community is still in a dilemma to embrace OA. This is what we find in our survey of researcher's attitude towards OA. There are many reasons ranging from lack of awareness, myths about OA and biasness towards traditional publishing model for prestige & recognition. We approached scientists of different research institutes and universities around Kolkata with different age groups in different ways. Interesting results have come out which clearly identified the major hurdles to adopt OA by scientific community in India

Open Courseware: A Unique Opportunity for India

The pivotal role of education as an instrument of social change - by altering the human perspective and transforming the traditional mindset of society is well recognized. The universalisation of education has become the top priority, especially for the developing countries. But the extension of quality education to remote and rural regions becomes a Herculean task for a large country like India with multi-lingual and multi-cultural population separated by vast geographical distances, and, in many instances, inaccessible terrain. Open Courseware (OCW) is part of a comparatively new educational movement in the line of Open Access (OA) and leading institutions and universities around the world are capitalizing it for the betterment of the society. OCW provides learners an opportunity to disseminate knowledge beyond the traditional classroom environment. The present study aims to spread the word of OCW and sensitize the teachers and learners about the tremendous potential of OCW in the context of education in Indi

ONLINE VISIBILITY OF WEBSITE THROUGH SEO TECHNIQUE: A CASE STUDY

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) [2, 9, 11, 12] is widely used nowadays for improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website through search engines. The results generated by search engines can be natural (organic or algorithmic) and/or paid search. In this paper we have discussed different techniques used for achieving better optimization for the website of Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), a premier research institute in India, devoted to the pursuit of fundamental research in the frontier areas of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Energy, Polymer and Materials. Different techniques related to SEO like keyword discovery, crawling, on-page and off-page optimization and different Google tools [7, 8] are discussed. The results discussed in this paper and investigation will help webmasters to gain a deep insight about SEO and also to guide them in making better decisions regarding the online visibility of their websites.Thomson Reuters,RRLF, DRDO, Elsevier, Springer and Informatic

Indian Journal of Physics: A scientometric analysis

Peer reviewed journals in the field of Science, Technology and Medical (STM) are the main vehicles through which scientists publish their research output, communicate opinions and exchange observations. Governments and industries of many countries are investing more money than before in science research. As a result, research output in terms of publications of original research articles has been increased substantially in the recent past. So there is a steady growth in STM journal publishing industries too. But unfortunately journals published by universities and learned societies of third world countries are facing a stiff competition from large commercial publishing houses and those are on the verge of extinction due to merger and acquisitions by large commercial publishers. India is one of the fastest growing nations in terms of research output in science. Over the last few years India is trying to establish herself as a global leader in science. The number of original research articles published by Indian scientists has been increased substantially in the recent past. But very few journals in science and specifically in the subject physics with high impact factor are published from India. As a result Indian scientists have no choice but to use journals with high impact factor published from outside India to publish their research output. Amongst the core physics journals published from India, Indian Journal of Physics (IJP) is one bright exception. It not only survived the stiff challenges from commercial publishers but also excelled in many ways that is clearly visible with steady increase in its impact factor over the last few years and for the year 2012 the impact factor of IJP is 1.785 that is highest for any physics journal published from India and comparable with other well known physics journals published from USA and European countries. Bibliometric and scientometric studies were carried out for individual journals in the past for different purposes. IJP is now in the centre of attention to physicists all over the world because of its reasonably good impact factor and the journal is getting more number of original articles from all over the world. The objective of this study is to throw light on the factors those play the vital role for the improvement of its quality by analysing different bibliometric and scientometric data for IJP. The result of this study may be useful and the measures taken by IJP can be extrapolated to other similar journals published by universities and societies from third world countries for improvement.10th International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics & 15th COLLNET Meeting 2014 during September 3-5, 2014 in Ilmenau Technical University, GermanyIndian Association for the Cultivation of Scienc

Digital Library of India: A Study of Independent Access

Digital Library of India (DLI) portal [5] was studied in this paper for its effectiveness and how far it is user friendly for independent acces