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Foundation of Library and Information Science

Notes Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:
13. The Extension Service (ES) is an effort of a library to diminish the number of its users to
make the maximize use of its resources.

14. The Extension Services may be organised through various programmes.
15. The coordination and cooperation among the staff members is not an important element
for successful execution of extension services.

Case Study Resource Sharing among ISRO Libraries

he much talked resource sharing and library networking in Indian context often
fails to reach the bottom/operational level to reap fruits in terms of increased
Tservice and/or decreased cost. The bottom-upward approach to resource sharing is
rare. As such there are no practical efforts like that of even ‘conspectus’ of RLG (Sridhar,
1997). Not many sincere attempts are made to narrow the gap between idealistic theoretical
slogans and the practical implementations (Sridhar, 1995). The latest addition to list of
slogans is `consortia approach’. It is not new to libraries as cooperative acquisition as a
way collective decision making existed before.
‘Consortia approach’ to e-journals is a marketing strategy of commercial publishers to get
continuous longer commitment from a group of libraries for their journals. There has
been a ‘journal war’ between scientists (authors) and commercial publishers who are
working with as high a margin as 35% in spite of the fact that production cost of e-journals
is very low as compared to print versions. Savings are estimated to be about 40-50% on
distribution cost and 30% on paper cost in case of e-journals. Scientists (Public Library of
Science) have pleaded for reduced prices for e-journals and free access to back issues of
e-journals (after six months) and subsequently resorted to publishing competitive
e-journals.
Steep reduction in buying power of libraries, in the recent past, needs no overemphasis.
Libraries have been combating the fiscal constraints mostly by cancelling the costly and
less used journals based on use studies and user opinion and try to depend on other
libraries. Depending on content page services, exchanging with in-house publications,
trying to obtain on gratis, etc., have already been substantially explored by most of
libraries. However, like publishers of journals, libraries also need to have new strategies
to face the unending fiscal constraints. An attempt is made here to present steps taken by
ISRO libraries to work quietly and differently in this direction.
Like other libraries in the country, there has been an informal but naturally marginal
activity of inter library loan and other mutual help among ISRO libraries. Efforts were
also put in to implement uniform library management software to enable remote networked
access of holdings of about a dozen libraries within the organisation. Taking advantage of
changed pricing policies of publishers coupled with availability of new media like CDROM,
ISAC library could save about $ 27,000 during last few years. All these savings are achieved
by making use of concessional prices extended for print subscribers and incidentally other
sister organisations did have print subscriptions. The latest being $ 3000 during 2001 on
AIAA papers using order of VSSC for CD-ROM version. Having done so and with the
Contd....

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