Use of Indian digital libraries by biomedical practitioners in West Bengal region: a study

Abstract

The use of Internet by students, teachers, researchers, journalists, librarians, information scientists, and numerous other professionals have already gathered momentum in our country with the strengthening of information infrastructure day-by-day. The number of Internet service providers, personal Internet connections, institutional Internet connections, cyber cafes, etc are also multiplying at a rapid rate. Biomedical practitioners in the world are also finding Internet-based information resources highly useful inasmuch as it is providing latest information about the harmful drugs being withdrawn, new drugs being introduced in the world, novel medical equipments being marketed, unique surgical techniques becoming successful, and so on. At this juncture, a question automatically arises as to what extent this facility is being used by biomedical practitioners of a region of our country, where computerization and Internet facility etc have started rather late. The study aims to find out the use of Indian digital libraries by biomedical practitioners in the West Bengal region. The data is to be gathered through a structured questionnaire that was circulated among biomedical practitioners. The questionnaire seeks to elicit the information on the extent of the use of open access biomedical literature; awareness about the biomedical databases, electronic journals, digital libraries, digital archives, web portals of biomedical organizations, etc. Digital libraries have already started coming up in India. National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources is developing Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), and National Informatics Centre is developing INDmed (Indian Biomedical Database), medIND (Indian Biomedical Literature) and OpenMed (Open Access archive on biomedical literature). All these databases are accessible free of cost. The study will lay special emphasis on the use of these biomedical information resources. Based on the findings of the study, suggestions are made as to how the awareness among biomedical practitioners can be increased to optimize the use of biomedical information resources in general and Indian digital libraries in particular.