FEATURE
Asia
‘I would say around 30 per cent of our resources come from India; the rest comes from the USA and European countries. Around 95 per cent of the technical books are in English; the rest are mainly non-technical books, published in India in the Malayalam language. The majority of the students have had their schooling in English so using the English language is not a major challenge to the users but there are exceptions where language is a problem.’
Despite the variation and challenges, the prevalence of English can help in accessing scholarly communication, even where not everybody is fluent in the language. As Chutima Sacchanand noted, ‘Other languages (except Thai and English) are very much a challenge. As my colleagues, my students and I, including other library professionals in Thailand, cannot read, write or speak other languages except English, this limits access to research and academic papers written in other languages, especially languages used in other Asian countries, such as Chinese and Japanese. ‘I wish, at least, that papers in other languages could have English abstracts so that we can have access to information from the literature of other countries in Asia that have similar backgrounds and learn and share our experiences,’ she added. ‘Scholarly publishers could better serve [LIS] researchers in my country and specifically in
Images of GGD SD College, India, courtesy of Gurpreet Singh Sohal
Asia in the future by developing a database of LIS researchers in Asia with their profiles, life and work with informative abstracts of their research and academic papers and developing a database of English abstracts of research and academic papers in the native languages,’ she continued.
Financial challenges It is dangerous to generalise, however, across so many diverse countries and cultures. For Jessie Satyanesan, of Mohandas College of
Gurpreet Singh Sohal librarian, GGD SD College, Chandigarh, India
Hindi is our mother tongue and we serve the Hindi, Punjabi, English, French, Urdu and Sanskrit languages.
I serve commerce and management, sciences, applied sciences, social sciences, computer science and engineering research. Journals and databases are subscribed to according to the requirements of the relevant departments. For the books, we hold exhibitions in different subject areas annually where our faculty chose books according to their requirement for the given subject area. Most of the 140 [print] journals and
periodicals we subscribe to are published by Indian publishers, Indian Government agencies and institutions, national presses, and private public houses. We have more than 61,000 books in our library, which are mostly published by national
20 Research Information FEB/MAR 2012
publishers. But in the last four to five years, we have added a large chunk of books from international publishers. Our college also has access to the N-LIST programme (India’s National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content), which provides access to e-resources for students, researchers and faculty from colleges and other beneficiary institutions. Through this programme our college can access 75000+ e-books and 3000+ e-journals. Databases like ProWess, Economic Intelligence Service (Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt.), GCG Accelrys (like Gen Bank, PIR, PDB) have been subscribed to by the college. Our College is also member of DELNET, which is a network for sharing resources between institutions.
Engineering & Technology in India, the main challenge is the cost of accessing resources. ‘Publishers of scholarly content should provide open access to the resources. They could also form a consortium and charge a smaller fee for third-world countries,’ he said.
Gurpreet Singh Sohal of GGD SD College in India echoed these concerns: ‘Paid resources are one of the biggest problems as individual institutions cannot take the burden of large chunks of money.’ He recommends following
‘There is a lack of sufficient research materials in the native languages of Asia’
a consortia approach at an India-wide level ‘as India is still a developing country and our colleges and institutions do not subscribe on their own because of financial constraints.’ He also recommends ‘pick and choose’ options for particular resources as complete publisher packages can be too expensive for a single institution.
But there are other issues to be addressed too: ‘Bandwidth is still a problem in our country. Speed has increased but this still needs to be improved. There is also a lack of skills among library professionals.’ Nonetheless, many challenges are universal: ‘I think the biggest challenge is to promote technology innovation-oriented reading habits in this age and attracting readers towards the library premises again,’ concluded Gurpreet Singh Sohal.
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