英语论文网

actually stopped subscribing to foreign journals for almost a decade. Colleges have hardly any access to research publications. New books are so expensive that most of these institutions find it very difficult to buy even a small fraction of what should be on their library shelves.

It is true that we have several well funded institutions who can afford to have fairly good libraries – though even they are beginning to suffer in recent years. On the other hand, a large majority of our 4 million higher education students and 250000 teachers in the universities and colleges can read about what is new only old review journals and popular magazines and that too in a form which is not very useful to an active researcher; this will not give any one feeling of being a participant in the enterprise of creating new knowledge. An atmosphere of participation becomes possible if people can have quick access to what is being done in the country and aboard and are able to inter-act quickly and easily with co-workers all over the country irrespective of their own location or distance from the metropolitan centres.

We asked ourselves: is there an affordable way to ameliorate the present situation and introduce a mechanism through which the situation can be dramatically altered. In this report, prepared by a Working Group of librarians, academician, scientists and engineers from a large number of organisations within the country, one such solution has been evolved. In arriving at the specific solution presented in this report we have tried to build on the infrastructure we already have. We have looked at our capabilities and searched for an appropriate community-oriented modern technology information and communication system. It is suggested that we should set up an Information & Library Network (INFLIBNET) which can inter-connect the people and library- resources of all universities, institutes of higher education and research laboratories.

It should be possible through such a system to search for a book no matter where it exists in the country and ask for an inter-library loan – irrespective of whether you belong to a newly set-up university or laboratory and irrespective of your location. Whether you are in an isolated institution in the foot-hills of Himalaya, middle, of a forest, sparsely populated regions of the North-East, western edges of the Rajasthan desert, Islands in the sea, or in a large metropolitan city, you should be able to search and get copies of the abstracts of the latest papers published in any major journal through the INFLIBNET facsimile service. Similarly, you should be able to get synposes of any of the ten thousand Ph. D theses written in the country every year. You should be able to reach and get information from specialised data banks put together by different agencies, including NISSAT, UGC and I hope, the Planning Commission. If one makes specific arrangements, it should also be possibles to reach foreign data banks form anywhere in the country.

Beside all these library services, one should be able to inter-act with like-minded academics independent of distance and work together on common scientific problems. One can have a countrywide bulletin board announcing special meetings and conferences and even specific conclusion and recommendations of conferences and of course, special happenings in academic, scientific and technical world” [2] 0.