Patna Women’s College principal Doris D’souza and minister Shahid Ali Khan at the workshop on Friday. Picture by Nagendra Kumar Singh

Patna, Feb. 18: Students pursuing different careers can now own their digital library if their colleges get them registered to one of the ambitious schemes of the Union government.

This was revealed by Ashok Kumar Rai at a workshop organised by the department of computer science, Patna Women’s College, in collaboration with the AN College. The theme of the worshop was “INFLIBNET: Awareness workshop for colleges of Bihar.”

Rai, a scientist of computer science at Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET) which is an autonomous inter-university centre of the UGC, Gujarat University, said if the colleges get themselves registered after paying a fee of Rs 5,000, the students would be able to avail the facilities. The colleges would have to fill up a form and they would have to renew the registration every year with the same amount.

Rai was the person chosen by the central human resource development (HRD) department to bring the project into the state.

The programme is named National Library Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content (N-List).

“Under this programme, faculty and students of the registered colleges would be given user ID by INFLIBNET, using which they can access the e-library which has a capacity of 51,000 e-books and 2,100 e-journals,” said Ashok Kumar Rai.

“This programme has been initiated for all the colleges across the country. At present, there are 6,000 government/government-aided colleges covered under sections 2F and 12B of UGC Act, which are the beneficiaries of the programme. According to our list, there are 294 colleges under 12B section of UGC Act in Bihar but only two colleges — Shershah College, Sasaram, and Yash Institute of Pharmacy, Aurangabad, — have registered to this programme,” added Rai.

He also explained the benefits of the e-library. “Students are going to get an exclusive range of material as this library covers e-books from renowned US publishers, including American Physical Society, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry and H.W. Wilson. The only thing colleges require is Internet-enabled PCs and local area network connected to Internet. INFLIBNET would provide the IP address and after that we provide the passwords to the students and faculty members within 48 hours. After getting the passwords, the colleges have to assign a contact person for interacting with INFLIBNET centre. After paying the token for membership, one can access the digital library,” said Rai.

He said one can access the material from N-List website http://nlist.inflibnet.ac.in.