NEPAL LIBRARY AND INFORMATION CONSORTIUM (NELIC) IN FACILITATING ACCESS TO E-RESOURCES

Abstract

The thesis entitled “Nepal Library and Information Consortium (NeLIC) in facilitating access to e-resources” has been carried out to find out role of NeLIC in providing access to scholarly e-resources for the fulfillment of scholarly information needs of the library users. NeLIC provides access to scholarly e-resources to its member libraries. But no research has been carried out with regarding to NeLIC and its eresources service. Review of ten different national and international literatures related to this topic has been done. Cases of different library consortia were studied. The major objectives of this study are: to point out the importance of library consortium, to find out whether the scholarly information needs of users are fulfilled or not, to obtain valuable opinions and suggestions from the librarians and users, to find out which resources are being able to fulfill information need of users. A set of questionnaire was distributed to the library users of seven member libraries of NeLIC. The librarians/information service providers were interviewed. The data collected from the library users and librarians has been analyzed and presented with the tables and charts. Simple statistical tools were used for the analysis of data. The major findings of this research are: JSTOR is nominated as the most appropriate eresource by most of the library users, most of the users have commented that the eresources available through NeLIC are useful but not sufficient, library users have demanded for addition of more e-resources related to management, development studies, Research Gate, etc. Various suggestions were made for the better e-resources service and better performance of NeLIC. Various recommendations were made like NeLIC should subscribe e-books as well, NeLIC should hire full time staffs so that they can devote their full concentration for the development of NeLIC, NeLIC should subscribe more eresources related to management, science and technology, NeLIC should conduct different trainings related to accessing information through e-resources. Meena Tamang Central Department of Library and Information Science, TU, Kirtipur