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Reports on the second phase of "ICAR‐INFLIBNET Training Programme for Agriculture Librarians on Networking and E‐Resources Management", a series of nine training programmes organized in two phases and hosted by the Indian Inter‐University Information & Network Centre. The programme, of two weeks duration, was supported by the World Bank through the National Agriculture Technology Project in New Delhi, India. The programme was specially designed for agricultural library professionals of Indian State Agriculture University, Agriculture Colleges and R&D institutes. The second phase was conducted during November 2003.

Reports on INFLIBNET’s annual convention International CALIBER – 2004 that was held at Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university in New Delhi on 11‐13 February. States that the theme of the convention was “Road Map to New Generation of libraries using emerging technologies” and papers were presented which emphasized the importance of the architecture of information for libraries and the need for a globalized information environment. The concluding session of the convention proposed that CALIBER – 2004 was an excellent opportunity for librarians and students to interact with experts in the field and that it would boost the ongoing initiatives for a library information system in agriculture libraries.

Purpose ‐ Reports on the INFLIBNET sponsored conference on the Promotion of Library Automation and Networking (PLANNER) in North Eastern Region of India. Design/methodology/approach ‐ Provides a brief report of the conference held in November 2004. Findings ‐ Those professionals and participants at this conference were able to update their knowledge and experiences. More than 150 professionals from Manipur and other states in the region and also from neighboring Bangladesh took part. There was also diversity among the authors of the papers with more than half being women. Originality/value ‐ Outlines the main points of a conference of interest to information management professionals.

Reports on a training programme – KVS ‐ INFLIBNET ‐ an in‐service training programme for school librarians on library automation, networking and e‐resources management. The course was of three weeks duration designed for kendriya vidyalaya school library professionals and held in mid 2004.

Owing to diminishing library budgets, coupled with the information explosion, academic librarians in India are finding it difficult to meet the insatiable demands of their clientele. For a country as geographically vast as India, having many universities located in remote places, this problem is compounded. Efforts were made in the past to provide document delivery services through a few documentation centres, set up by the Government in different disciplines. This paper focuses on the initiatives launched by the University Grants Commission of India in the last few years, through the INFLIBNET Centre, to provide this service through electronic means by computerizing university libraries, establishing a network and setting up document delivery centres.

To share with readers the scope and content of presentations made at the CALIBER 2005 meeting.

Descriptive case studies and innovation were presented in the context of how progress in these areas has been made in both developing and developed parts of the world.

Information technology infrastructure allows for all these themes to be developed. An increased awareness of how workflow leads to new product development and new libraries services evolve is described in this conference report. The digital arena is explored from many vantage points including digital resources, consortia development, eLearning and eScholarship, and the changing role of the internet.

A scientific approach is tested in most of the research projects described with great dependence on a range of information technology tools that promote networking and digital library development.

International development takes place in a period of great collaboration and that spirit is widely pronounced at this conference and in the presentations made there. Practical Implications: Many different projects were shared ranging in scale from modest to highly sophisticated, involving one institution or a consortia. E‐Learning and distance education were environments that had high impact at this conference.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the fully open access (OA) contents cited by researchers from top three universities in the USA (MIT, CIT and Stanford) in the field of physics. This study aims to identify the core fully OA journals widely used by researchers in the field of physics and evaluate the cited fully OA resources by applying various scientometric parameters to check the credibility of these OA resources.

The PhD theses awarded during 2014 in the field of physics and hosted in the institutional repositories of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (CIT) and Stanford University, respectively, were selected and scanned to extract references of sources cited. Later on, Google Scholar was used to identify source journals of the extracted references. Only source “journals” were selected and analyzed; rest of other sources were ignored; accordingly, toll-access and OA journals were segregated, as such the OA-cited journals could be identified. The scientometric performance indicators were used to check the quality of identified core fully OA journal cited by USA researchers in the field of physics.

The results of this study show that fully OA resources are sufficiently used by the researchers of top three academic institutions of the world/USA. The study was also successful in identifying the core fully OA journals; besides it also reveals that these fully OA journals are highly impressive as showed by performance indicators applied. The major finding of the research includes the identification of top ten fully OA journals along with their impact based on different scientometric parameters like number of times cited, impact factor, h-index, immediacy index, impact per publication and Scimago Journal Rank (SJR).

Because of a limited corpus of literature scrutinized in this study, the findings of the study may or may not represent the global picture in the field of physics.

The paper confirms that fully OA resources usage trend is positively increasing day by day, and there are vast numbers of core OA journals with high-quality impact available for use to researchers around the world. Besides, the paper also affirms the view that there should be more publicity of fully OA literature around the globe to reap the benefits of the same.

This paper will assist researchers, libraries, information centers and research and development institutions to take a cost-efficient approach in using and disseminating the scholarly literature.

This paper is one of the first pieces of research conducted on electronic theses and dissertation (ETD’s) in top three universities of the USA, to check usage percentage and quality of fully OA journal resources cited by doctoral students in the field of physics.

This paper focuses on the use of UGC‐Infonet Digital Library Consortium Resources by research scholars and faculty members of University of Delhi in History and Political Science. The main aim is to determine the needs of research scholars and faculty members of University of Delhi in the discipline of history and political science and to find out how far their information needs are fulfilled by the information resources available through UGC‐Infonet Digital Library Consortium. The paper attempts to define this consortium, its objectives, scope, e‐resources subscribed and the government initiative to provide current information in various disciplines for research and teaching excellence.

To study the information usage pattern and needs of the respective users a survey was conducted among faculty and research scholars. The population included in the study comprised 105 respondents from both departments and of that, eight are faculty and 97 are research scholars.

The study tangibly explains the genesis, e‐resources facilities and usage of e‐resources available through UGC‐Infonet Digital Library Consortium (a University Grants Commission of India sponsored consortium) to provide e‐resources and current information in various disciplines. The UGC‐Infonet Digital Library Consortium is the most important consortium providing access to a large array of e‐resources to all academic universities and colleges in India and thus facilitates the prompt access and efficient and effective usage of e‐resources for teaching and research activities.

The scope of the study is confined to faculty members and research scholars of the Department of History and Political Science of the University of Delhi respectively, regarding the use of e‐journals provided by UGC‐INFONET Digital Library Consortium.

The paper reflects the users' awareness regarding the consortium resources available in the respective fields, information about important databases and e‐journals, search techniques, recurring usage for information and knowledge, help and support in research output and teaching activities, benefits accrued such as saving of time, effort and the problems faced.