Lessons online: Karim City College

Students of Karim City College will now be able to do reams of research while skimming through the best academic journals and reference material without paying a visit to the library.

The Jamshedpur college became the first in Kolhan to set up a virtual or e-library for its students, teachers and alumni, with Kochi-based multinational company Orell installing the study server on Tuesday.

The website, http://karimcitycollege.orell.org, is practically an extension of the crammed college library, which has hardly any space left to accommodate more books.

The cradle is the second in Jharkhand after St Xavier’s College, Ranchi, to boast a virtual library.

The college had already adopted e-cataloguing of books last year, allowing students to search for their desired books from the database stored in computers.

Books are also being issued after barcode entries.

But from now on, students just have to register on the website for a scanning books on their own.

“The college library is crammed with roughly 56,000 books catering to around 6,000 students. However, with increasing number of courses and students, it hardly has any place to store more books. Thus, e-library was the best option we could offer to our students and also our alumni. A student just has to register online to access books,” said Yahiya Ibrahim, a senior faculty member of English who is in charge of the e-library.

Karim City College had earlier installed Inflibnet (Information and Library Network), also an online library, in association with the Union ministry of human resource development.

While Inflibnet has access to books and journals provided by the ministry, the e-library will have on its platter books that are available in the college library.

Registered members can also upload books of their choice in Microsoft Word and PDF formats.

The server has been installed at a cost of about Rs 1.90 lakh.

“There are many extremely good books in the library that are out of print now. We have a plan to scan and upload such books on the website. We don’t even have to acquire 10 copies of a single book, as it will be available at the click of a mouse. At present, the virtual library has 10,000 e-books and 1,000 journals,” said Ahmed Badr, a senior faculty member of Urdu.

Any student, teacher or alumnus can log on to the website and register to earn their membership.

“A separate portal for blogs will also be soon available for students to upload written pieces and video lectures. Notes can be uploaded on the virtual library as well,” said Ibrahim.

Last month, the college also set up an e-classroom, which is already functional, for final-year students.