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This paper focuses on finding the criteria adopted by users to select free information retrieved from the Web for academic use. A close-ended questionnaire was formulated to record the opinions of the respondents. A survey for various categories of users such as post graduate students, research scholars and faculty members from five universities of Chandigarh, Haryana, and Punjab was administered. The category-wise and discipline-wise analysis depicted that quite a good number of respondents applied various parameters while referring to Web resources, but a reasonable number of users did not apply certain parameters to verify the nature of free information being used for educational purposes. The convenience factor leads them to depend on free Web resources which can be accessed anywhere and saves time. The findings of the study suggest that user education programs should be conducted to create awareness regarding the credibility of the subscribed library resources and their effectiveness in enhancing the quality of teaching, learning, and research.

Indigenization has been an important nationalist project undertaken by various colonized countries seeking to liberate the existing knowledge systems from colonial hegemony. In India too, one witnesses serious efforts at indigenization that began during the colonial rule as part of the anti-colonial nationalist struggle. This continued after independence with new vigour. It found resonance in the domain of social sciences and the Indian social scientists have been engaged in debates around decolonizing the extant knowledge texts in their respective domains. An essential part of indigenization of social science in the Indian context is their vernacularization, which implies a process of translation and adaptation of the knowledge texts in its diverse local/regional languages. Underscoring the importance of both the processes in decolonizing the social sciences, the paper also highlights the existing and the emerging challenges to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]