Digital Divide in the View of Library Management

[Bidhan Dolai]

Digital divide is now a popular term. I am trying to justify e-resource access in different institute. Have any relation of E-resource access with digital divide in the view of library management? Here I am trying to examining information seeking behaviour among college students and inequality of e resource access. What will be the steps that I should follow? Any suggestions are hearty welcome .

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear Sri Bidhan Dolai,

Thanks for your post and for the project you have undertaken. I would like to know what type of "Colleges" you have selected in your study? those under UGC ( I term them here as UGC Colleges) or others like AICTE/MCI.?

As I presume, there are mainly two aspects behind what we say as "digital Divide" 

One is inadequate infrastructure and

the other is inadequate resource.

I am highlighting these two issues because organizations like AICTE has clear mandates for e-materials; as such, for the institutes under AICTE, there happens to be a basic minimum standard for the e-resources. Amidst this situation, one can still observe uneven scoring (e.g. No. of logs or downloads per day) of usage of e-resources which may generally reflect as a sort of input to digital divide!! Of course this could happen because of lesser number of machines, slow internet speed etc. which can be explained as infrastructural limitations but above all these, (I hope you will agree with me) lukewarm response from the user community should also be accepted (& used) as a parameter. As such, I personally feel that your project warrants several issues to clarify. You may also notice seasonal variations in usage as well!!

Regarding the UGC Colleges, there are some who get free access through INFLIBNET while all are not so lucky. So you see that there exists an "unevenness" in the baseline itself. accruing this with the usual reasons one can understand the actual picture. Colleges conducting P.G courses normally have better usage and thus have a compelling necessity to better their infrastructure and resources.

What I meant to say is what we normally see about the usage, has several intrinsic issues which needs to be taken into consideration.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray 

[Munesh Kumar]

Dear Sir,

Bidhan

It is very complicated for me to come on a fixed and clear cut answer. Sir, Ray has given a mature environment which nests the answer of your questions.  But one thing I don't understand in your points, "inequality of e resource access"? I would request you to clear the periphery of this sentence, in which context you are talking about? I hope and assure you to give you a informative suggestion on "Digital divide in the view of library Management".

Thank you. 

[Bidhan Dolai]

Thank you very much Siddhartha Shankar Ray sir .Sir, Your valuable feedback help me a lot to understand the topic .Thanks a lot again sir for keeping your helping hand beside me.