The UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium was formally launched in December, 2003 by Honourable Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam, the then President of India soon after providing the Internet connectivity to the universities in the year 2003 under the UGC-Infonet programme. The Consortium proved to be a recipe to university libraries which have been discontinuing subscription of scholarly journals because of "Serials Crisis". The term "serials crisis" refers to exponential and continuing increase in subscription cost of scholarly journals. The crisis is a result of rise in cost of journals much faster than the rate of inflation, increase in number of journals and the paucity of funds available to the libraries.

The Consortium provides current as well as archival access to more than 4500 core and peer-reviewed journals and nine bibliographic databases from 23 publishers and aggregators in different disciplines. The programme has been implemented in phased manner. In the first phase that began in 2004, access to e-resources was provided to 50 universities who had Internet connectivity under the UGC-Infonet Connectivity programme of the UGC. In the second phase, 50 more universities were added to the programme in the year 2005. So far 120 Universities out of 171 that come under the purview of UGC, have been provided differential access to subscribed e-resources. These e-resources covers almost all subject disciplines including arts, humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, chemical Sciences, life sciences, computer sciences, mathematics and statistics, etc. The programme is wholly funded by the UGC and executed by the INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network) Centre, Ahmedabad.

Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre is an Autonomous Inter-University Centre (IUC) of University Grants Commission (UGC) involved in creating infrastructure for sharing of library and information resources and services among Academic and Research Institutions. INFLIBNET works collaboratively with Indian university libraries to shape the future of the academic libraries in the evolving information environment.

The benefit of subscription to e-resources would also be extended to the colleges, to begin with the College for Potential with Excellence (CPE). The Consortium also plans to launch its "Associate Membership Programme" wherein private universities and other research organizations would be welcomed to join the Consortium for selected e-resources.

ILL Libraries & Article Delivery

INLIBNET has initiated interlibrary loans and document delivery services from the comprehensive collection of subscribed journals under JCCC@UGC- INFONET. ILL is also known as Inter-Library Lending.INFLIBNET has designated 22 libraries to fulfill ILL request from the users, affiliated to 149 universities covered under UGC. The ILL libraries together subscribe for 2000 plus journals that is not available through consortia. Universities can request for articles from the journal holdings of those libraries wherever they find useful articles in JCCC search, that are not available in that library.

Dr. Jagdish Arora
Director- INFLIBNET Centre,
An Inter University Centre of University Grants Commission,
Opp. Gujarat University Guest House, 
Post Box No. 4116, Navrangpura, 
Ahmedabad - 380009. Gujarat, INDIA.
Tel:+91-79-26308528/ 26304695 
Fax: +91-79-26300990/26307816