Empowering research in digital environment: a collaborative approach by Indian agricultural libraries and research centres

The article discusses the use of digital platforms, consortiums, collaborative online catalogues that have substantially transformed the Indian agricultural libraries and are playing a significant role in research support in digital environment. It describes the use of CeRA (Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture) online platform in Pantvarsity for the five years. It is shown that the use of these e-resources by the academic community of the university has a declining trend. The analysis has revealed that while research information available through the platform is highly valued in the university system, many patrons including students and faculties both are not largely dependent only on the consortium resources, and are likely be comfortable with other easily available open access research materials over the web, repositories or print journals and digital repositories. The author suggests that librarians should create greater awareness about the consortium resources, identify barriers, faced by the academic community in accessing these resources for fruitful utilization of this platform.