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A quantitative and qualitative description of global research in "electronic journals" on a series of measures such as annual growth, global publications share, citations per paper, international collaborative papers, relative citation index, and activity index is presented. The study sourced data from SCOPUS database covering the period 1990-2017. Global research in the subject registered a fast 18.46 per cent publications growth, low-level citation rate of 5.28 citations per paper, and contributed just 26 highly cited papers during the period. The paper also describes the characteristics of highly cited papers in the subject. The study finds that the USA is the world leader with highest (45.28%) global publications share in the subject, followed by U.K. (12.18%), India (5.49%), etc. Secondly, the distribution of research across contributing organisations is of most scattered type. For instance, top 20 organisations in the subject contributed just a small 16.58 per cent global publications share during the period. The study concludes that the 'electronic journals' as an area of research is still in its nascent stage of growth and development both in terms of quality and quantity of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The developments in information technology have made drastic changes in the way the information is collected, stored, retrieved, and distributed. Electronic journal is one of the products of information and communication technologies. The advancement of e-journal during recent years has given librarians a powerful new resource to support learning and research. With availability of both forms of journals in the library, it has become necessary to compare and evaluate effectiveness of e-journals and print journals from users' and librarys' point of view. The paper discusses a case study done at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research to find out the information-seeking patterns of the library users. The paper also discusses advantages and disadvantages of e-journals and suggests that printed and e-journals are complimentary to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Libraries have experienced many transformations along with time. Scenario has further changed with the information explosion and advent of Internet and telecommunications technologies. Information seeking has become much more complex due to ever increasing amount of data, in both printed and electronic forms, and no single library is self-sufficient to purchase all the books/e-books, journals/e-journals and other library documents within their library budgets. Library consortium is one of the solutions to overcome this problem. However, due to ever increasing prices of journals, vendor dominated market, lack of competition, and for other reasons, question of whether consortium approach, some of the experiences in accessing e-journals through this approach, a viable alternative for journal's price hike or not? This paper is a case study of CSIR e-journal Consortium and discusses need for consortia, types, advantages and disadvantages of a consortium, problems faced by the consortiums and possible solutions for some of these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prohibitive cost of library material, especially foreign journals, pertaining to science and technology, has always been a bane of information centres, especially in the developing countries, taking away large chunk of their meager resources and therefore always a hindrance to provide better services to the users. Libraries tried to bridge this gap by borrowing and inter lending required documents among themselves. Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have changed the publication scenario as well as the mode of resource sharing due to availability of e-journals and online resources. Rise in number of personal computers, Internet, and networks (LAN, MAN and WANs) besides augmenting the availability of the material increased the speed with which the information is now accessible. ICT also facilitated the establishment of library consortia for maintaining information resources together. In India, during the last few years, many leading scientific and technical organisations have established consortia to share their human and electronic resources. This paper briefly discusses the consortia initiatives taken at Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), a premier research organisation of Ministry of Defence, engaged in the indigenous development of cutting-edge defence technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]