Managing Open Access (OA) Scholarly Information Resources in a University

Managing Open Access (OA) Scholarly Information Resources in a University

Dimple Patel, Deepti Thakur
Copyright: © 2017 |Pages: 32
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1697-2.ch011
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Abstract

Open Access (OA) to scholarly information has now become a reality. Due to the efforts of OA supporters worldwide now even commercial publishers have started supporting open access to their content through various open access models. Many public institutions like universities and R&D Labs have realized the importance of OA in developing the society in general. As a result, these institutions have come up with OA repositories, archives and libraries. As with any such proliferation of information, OA resources have increased manifold and can easily overwhelm even an experienced user. Also different repositories may use various digital library software, which presents the problem of multifarious search interfaces and features. The solution can be found in the open community of open source software and open standards. The open source metadata harvesting software PKP-OHS and the open protocol for metadata harvesting i.e. OAI-PMH come to the rescue. This chapter discusses how PKP-OHS was implemented as a pilot study at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP).
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Open Access (Oa) Scholarly Information

Open access is gaining popularity day by day and every subject has been positively impacted by it. There are thousands of open access digital repositories available as on date as the numbers are increasing. As on date of writing this chapter, the Registry of Open Access Resources (ROAR) (http://opendoar.org/) reported 3016 repositories worldwide and 71 in India.

Though it is heartening to see the ever-increasing numbers of digital repositories of scholarly information, the large numbers pose few issues to the users. It is easy for users to be overwhelmed by the enormous volume of open access information available. First problem which users come across is individually going one by one to each of the repositories to search for scholarly resources. This way users have to spend lot of time finding out URLs or web addresses of various digital repositories and go through each one of them individual. Secondly various digital repositories may use as many software at back-end which have different search features and interfaces. Users may have to spend time getting accustomed to the different search interfaces of different repositories. To overcome this difficulty implementation of a unified search service was taken up as a pilot project at CUHP.

Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP)

The Prime Minister, in his address to the nation on August 15, 2007, announced the establishment of a Central University in each of the states that did not have a central university so far. Subsequently, 11th Plan provided for the establishment of 16 new Central Universities. Accordingly, the Central Universities Act 2009 (No. 25 of 2009) which received Presidential assent on 20th March 2009 provided for the establishment of Central University of Himachal Pradesh amongst others. The Central University of Himachal Pradesh is established under the Central Universities Act 2009 (No. 25 of 2009) enacted by the Parliament. The University is funded and regulated by the University Grants Commission (UGC). The University became functional with the assumption of charge by the first Vice Chancellor on 20th January 2010. Pending the development of its own infrastructure and permanent campuses, the university is presently operating from its Temporary Campuses. (http://cuhimachal.ac.in/cuhp_about_genesis.aspx)

Information Resource Centre, Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP)

The Information Resource Centre of Central University of Himachal Pradesh is functional in the Temporary Academic Block (TAB), Shahpur Campus, which is being further developed with adequate number of books, journals, and reference material related to the disciplines in which programmes of studies are being offered. Library automation using SOUL V2.0 has been implemented. Presently the OPAC is available on the campus Local Area Network (LAN) only. The Information Resource Centre holdings consist of a collection of about 14000+ Books (including 1000+ Hindi books and 165 Bi-lingual Dictionaries), 12 Newspapers, 113 Print journals (with online access for 10 Foreign and one national journal(s)). The Information Resource Centre is equipped with Reference collection and services and a moderate Reading room.

Though short on physical space the Information Resource Centre of the university is able to satisfy most information needs of its faculty, researchers and students by taking advantage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The university provides its users with many e-resources. The university Information Resource Centre has access to more than 100 e-journals through the INFLIBNET and DELNET consortia. The university has subscribed to J-Gate which is an integrated search service for subscribed e-journals and also facilitates direct online Inter-Library Loan (ILL) requests to the other member libraries of the consortia. The university also provides remote access to subscribed and consortia-based e-resources through EZProxy software of Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC). Presently the remote access to the e-resources via EZProxy is restricted to the faculty and research students only. The university plans to extend this service to post-graduate students in near future.

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