Effectiveness of Using E-Resources in Higher Education: Emerging Trends in Academic Libraries in 21st Century

Abstract

In the age of ever-growing Information Explosion, e-resources have become indispensable tools in academic libraries. It is known to all that the library is a service-oriented organization, so the library must be able to serve globally. Information and Communication Technology has revolutionized the whole educational world and the environment of academic libraries has also been changing from traditional to digital libraries. As a result, significant changes in the library collections and services have come to notice. This chapter focuses on the various facets of e-resources in terms of their development, advantages and disadvantages, main features, and the effectiveness of using e-resources in academic libraries in the context of higher education. The study reveals that the traditional methods of storage, retrieval, and communication of scholarly information have been completely changed due to the fast advancement in Information and Communication Technology resulting in steady progress in the use of online information sources by the scholarly community in the form of E-journals, E-books, E-databases. Hence it is the prime duty of academic libraries to make all those resources easily available to the users, and then only they will be able to play their part fully in the field of teaching, learning, and research.