E-Resource Availability and Importance for Higher Education and Research in India

In the past, readers of books and journals had to spend much of their time and energy in exploring the hard copies in order to find the literature on specific themes. This wastage of time, energy, and cost can only be realized now with the availability of electronic resource material through World Wide Web where most of the institutions and publishers of books and journals have placed their information. Availability of such information provides much help in qualitative improvement in education and research. This has severely benefited the educationists and researchers by creating an environment where there is little scope for knowledge gaps. This study tries to explore the advances in E-resource availability during the last few years. Big publishing houses with diverse portfolio of journals across the world have been listed with their total numbers of journals. Provision of these E-resources by the government agencies like UGC and INFLIBNET through their schemes like E-Consortium and N-LIST have been explained in detail with a special reference to Himachal Pradesh. These schemes have provided a free flow of updated knowledge content to the stakeholders and thereby helping in the overall quality improvement of higher education in the country.