Library consortia in India with special reference to UGC-Infonet digital library consortium

• UGC-Infonet is the most popular library consortium in terms of users and availability of resources.
• The consortium has been greatly benefiting the universities across the country.
• The members of this consortium get access to current as well as archival resources.
• Usage of electronic resources is getting higher year by year.
• Average cost per article download is getting down.

Including scholarly contents has given right to the publishers of peer-reviewed journals to keep higher subscription rates. It always affects library budget to a great extent. Since long libraries have been experimenting different ways of library cooperation so that maximum benefit, especially economic benefit, could be extracted from their joint cooperation ventures. The term ‘consortia’ has been considered an advanced stage of library cooperation. Advent of electronic journals has given rise to homogonous libraries and national governments to cope with scarcity of funds and unavailability of internationally produced scholarly literature by means of establishing library consortia. Various library consortia have been mushroomed all across the world and India has also not been spared from it. University Grants Commission (UGC) observed the dire state of Indian university libraries and found that only few were subscribing to some International peer-reviewed journals and many were not even subscribing to any international journal. The UGC opted electronic journals as medium and initiated a national consortium for strengthening library collection by providing thousands of international peer-reviewed journals over Internet free of cost. The consortium is known as UGC-Infonet Digital Library consortium. In this paper an effort is being made to discuss the various concepts of library consortia in India briefly and UGC-Infonet Digital Library consortium in detail.