Community acceptance of E - Journals as a robust print surrogate and scholarship supplement: The IIMK experience

Abstract

The dawn of the new millennium has registered a paradigm shift in the library environment and to the overall information access-dissemination-consumption culture the world over. Its repercussions on libraries, information systems and the user community, especially among the academic and research institutions in India, have been phenomenal and unprecedented. In particular reference to the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIMK), the advent of an array of ICT applications, the sudden upsurge and the abrupt penetration of a vast variety of electronic content, the multitude of electronic information services from the library, all these have attracted, potentially influenced and prompted the user community to step in and stick to the changed scenario. Among these, typically, the E-Journal services claimed a distinctive identity with a massive 40-fold increase in titles almost instantaneously. In the electronic scholarly publishing ecosystem E-Journals form one of the major stakeholders. E-Journals extend numerous advantages to libraries and to the user community. They offer concurrent and multiple access to the content, remote access, multimedia facilities, online searching, and considerable storage savings. IIMK, in phases, has been providing online access to approximately over 1300 E-Journals sourced directly from publishers and over 12,500 E-Journal content sourced through aggregators. Switching over to the technology pedestal gave us an exponential growth in the journal base, as well as facility to outreach to a wider community at a 24X7 formula. IIMK also explored numerous resource base enhancement innovations such as the IIM Consortium, INDEST Consortium and several Open Source Digital Library technologies towards making the library vibrant, resourceful, outreaching, accessible and visible. As a result of all these, over a period of 3 to 4 years, there have been tangible evidences of improved and increased scientific productivity registered by the institute. The overall intellectual capital of the Institute also has gone up exponentially as evidenced by the increase in publications and the conferences, symposia, workshops etc. hosted by us in the recent past. This paper portrays the cultural changes encountered and embraced by the faculty, students and researchers at IIMK, and the user acceptance as well as the appreciation of E-Journals over the past 6 years. It also narrates the internal institutional dynamism, information literacy measures and other strategies adopted by us towards this organizational transformation.