JOIN USi-Scholar, a digital library of scholarly online journals, was launched at the 15th International Conference on Asia Pacific Digital Libraries, 2013, here on Monday.
It contains 131 journals in subjects such as agriculture, engineering and management. Papers from the journal can be downloaded on the basis of a subscription.
Speaking at the conference, H K Patil, Minister for Rural Development and Panchayat Raj, said, “Social media has the capacity to change the polity of a country. We, therefore, need a responsible social media. However, many do not know how to authenticate information,” he said.
In order to authenticate the veracity of the vast amount of information on the web and the growing social media, there is a need to develop digital libraries, Patil said.
The minister highlighted his efforts at trying to bring about digitisation of the library at the Vidhana Soudha years ago, which yielded few results. “Except for the librarian, we did not see anything else. The basics were not taught to anyone else. New things are seldom accepted in the government,” Patil lamented.
Governor H R Bhardwaj hoped that universities in the State would increase their efforts at sharing knowledge and data through such means.