Role of UGC in the Development of Academic Libraries

150 International Journal of Advance and Applied Research www.ijaar.co.in ISSN – 2347-7075 Impact Factor – 8.141 Peer Reviewed Bi-Monthly Vol. 6 No. 39 September - October - 2025 Role of UGC in the Development of Academic Libraries Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb Librarian, K.J. S College Kopargaon Corresponding Author – Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb DOI - 10.5281/zenodo.17267655 Abstracts: The University Grants Commission (UGC) of India has played a pivotal role in the development of academic libraries since its inception. It has been instrumental in shaping policies, providing financial support, and setting standards to ensure these libraries are well-equipped and efficiently managed. This paper deals with overall development of academic libraries and UGC's influence is evident in several key areas. Keywords: Library committee, Academic Libraries. University Grants Commission. Introduction: In 1957 UGC has set up a committee headed by Dr. S. R. Rangnathan for the progress of higher education in the India, whose work was to provide suggestions about the growth of libraries. After surveying university and college libraries they submitted the report in 1961about the libraries and their institutes. In the report so many suggestions were remarked. As a result of which progress and overall development, at different levels of academic libraries became feasible in India. Following are the recommendations committee has given,  Each book, periodical/Journals/magazines accessed in the library should be completely process and made it for use to the user within two weeks.  Periodical/journal/magazines subscription period should be three years.  In same region the university and college libraries should collaborate with each other; and each library should be follow constant staff formula.  Every Library has to prepare a list of scholarly periodicals/Journals/magazines and send it National Central library and to INSDOC.  Book selection procedure should be a regular.  Every library functions effects should be made by preparing, weekly lists of newly added of books, Library orientations and Information literacy programmes, book exhibitions, to prepare bibliographies on specific topics.  Yearly recurring grants of the book and fund should be permitted by the authorities in discussion with the librarian, and also the faculty members.  Apart from the UGC grant every university should add to its library account moreover 6% of its total yearly income received funds from the state government, and other sources, or Rs. 50,000/- which will be more. IJAAR Vol. 6 No. 39 ISSN – 2347-7075 Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb 151  While preparing library budget after allocating the funds for scholarly periodicals textbook collection and other requirements, the balance fund to give the first priority for the reference books. UGC and Academic Libraries: For the development of academic libraries UGC has started giving more funds. In the five-year plans of the country, the condition was made to start on the work for this purpose. UGC and Pay Scales of Library Staff: Cadre like faculty members of the universities and the college pay scale of qualified library professional as per their post UGC determined the pay scales. In 1961 the revised pay scales were given to library staff, but in 1973 revised scales the same were not provided but to the teachers were provided. Now, since 1986, the revised scales have also being given by UGC to the library staff, along with teachers of colleges and universities. UGC and Library Science Training: Well qualified and skilled library staff may serve the library users in better ways. These committees suggested the rules and regulation for qualification, admission, syllabus, etc. for B.Lib.Sc and M.Lib.Sc courses. UGC and National Information Centers: At Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore and Varanasi UGC has also established and sponsored five National Information Centers, to provide the current research scientists busy in the research for the progress of the country. UGC and Reprographic Service: UGC has made the provision in the sixth five-year plan of the country, for providing reprographic facility in research and development libraries for the purpose of to save the time of research scientists, who are busy in their research work. UGC and Computers: India has also recognized usefulness of computers in the libraries for providing better library services. Like other developed countries for this purpose, UGC has provided at least one computer and created one post of Information scientist for handling it in each and every college and university library of the country. UGC and Establishment of INFLIBNET: UGC has established a national information network named INFLIBNET in 1996 at Ahmadabad having the aim of information communication of the libraries of all universities, higher educational and research institutes of our country. By all this, we can say, UGC developed a system in the libraries for the progress of education, in which it announced to give regular and extra grant for the books, periodicals, furniture, buildings, tools and machines and staff of the libraries of colleges and universities. As a result of it, the place of libraries became important in college and universities of the country. INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network): The Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre was established of a project of IUCAA in 1991 and was known and as an autonomous InterUniversity Centre (IUC) of the University Grants Commission (UGC) in May 1996. Main functions and services of the Centre is academic library automation and the union databases creation also to support resource sharing between academic libraries, provide information access. Now a day’s technology has a great impact on the current education system, the UGC has taken-up a major inventiveness to develop the academic society like, “UGCInfonet Digital Library Consortium” it provides access to e journals and databases in all Displine. The INFLIBNET Centre is responsible for implementation and supervising of this programme and also extends access to e-resources to all Govt.- aided colleges under the project N-LIST “National Library and Information IJAAR Vol. 6 No. 39 ISSN – 2347-7075 Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb 152 Infrastructure for Scholarly Content” by the MHRD. For the benefit of academic society INFLIBNET has taken many projects under the UGC it includes,  ShodhGanga: Indian Theses and Dissertations;  Shodhgangotri: for the registration under the Ph.D. programme a repository of synopsis submitted to the universities.  OJAS@INFLIBNET: An open access journal publishing platform;  Shibboleth-based access management system;  Open source software Research & Development;  e-PG Pathshala: e-Content for all PG Courses  Info Portal: Full text access to all Indian electronic scholarly content. Aims and Objectives:  To support and create communication services to develop ability in information shift and access that offer to scholarship, learning, for research and academic pursuits through collaboration and association of concerned agencies;  To create information and library network – a virtual network for connecting the all-academic libraries, in universities and colleges national information centers and the research and development institutions.  To assist academic communication between academicians, faculty members and students, scientists, via e mail, file transfer, computer/audio/video conferencing, etc.  To create proper control and monitoring system for the communication network.  To work together with institutions, libraries, information center’s and other organizations.  To support Research and development of all essential facilities to make e technical positions. To generate the revenue by giving the consultancies and information services. Scientific and Technical Activities of INFLIBNET: As per the needs of the academics the center has taken number of scientific and technical activities based on its functional services of research and development, human resource development. Main scientific and technical activities undertaken as follows University Libraries Automation: The UGC, on suggestion of the INFLIBNET Centre, during the IX plan period had supported 142 universities funds allotted and also in the period of XI/XII 24 universities funds allotted for the automation of libraries with training programme and software support from the center. During the IX plan period centre proactively helped universities and their libraries that were funded for library automation, standard bibliographic formats, tools and techniques and retro-conversion special training programmes were organized. IndCat: Indian universities union catalogues. The expansion of union databases of a variety of library resources like books, journals research report, and Ph.D. theses has been one of the most significant functions of the centre since its origin. Online Union Catalogue of Indian Universities” developed by the Centre is a consequence of the financial and logistic support accessible to 166 universities by the UGC under its library automation scheme mentioned above. In the IndCat database the no. of records available is as follows: IJAAR Vol. 6 No. 39 ISSN – 2347-7075 Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb 153 Books: From 157 university libraries 128+ Lakhs bibliographic records with around 73.76 lakhs unique records Theses: From 287 Indian universities 2.5+ Lakhs doctoral theses submitted. Current journal titles: including UGC Infonet digital library consortium and by 213 university libraries subscribed currently journal titles. Holding: from the 89 participating university libraries 50,164 holding information of the serials. CEC's Video Database: Union catalogue of Indian universities total 14,909 bibliographical records of educational video programmes are available. By the database research and development group the graphical user interfaces for IndCat was developed in-house. These make easy users to look through bibliographic information stored in union databases by different subjects its arrangement is alphabetical user can search the information by using the keywords, name of university or the name of the author even though in these interface users can search for a document in a particular university, or universities in a geographical area. In every participating university libraries IndCat is a Virtual catalogue resource is available. The majority search interfaces for the union database hold searching with unstable quantity of capability ranging from Advance to simple search along with Boolean operators. The union database of books provides selected bibliographic records in MARC21 for downloading in integrated library software and also provides the download in common communication format and in ISO format. All the union databases are developed in offline mode in this the participating university libraries have to send their bibliographic data from time to time in a group method. After checking the data the center merge all record into union catalogue. The center is making the efforts to execute all the activities in online mode. Also the center has made available online database for serials. To avoid the duplication in cooperative cataloguing while providing the facilities of union catalogue books and their new additions of books the center has developed a online copy catalogue system. With the help of OCS libraries can search and browse the records of particular documents available in IndCat download directly into the SOUL library software and also it gets updated automatically. Consortium for Educational Communication Video Database: The Centre and CEC, in its attempt to reach out to the unreached, are collaborating for distribution of textual and visual resources via use and application of Information communication technology. These are the inter-university Centre of the University grant commission, provide information maintain for education and research to colleges and universities all the way through their services also center gives the service of full text and bibliographic e resources through the consortium. The CEC gives a more emphasis on making and distributing of multimedia-based learning eresources. Software for University Libraries SOUL 2.0 is integrated LMS is designed and developed by the INFLIBNET based on the familiarity by the centre more than a year’s requirements of academic libraries. The first version of the SOUL Software was introduced in Chennai at the CALIBER 2000, and SOUL 2.0 is the second version which simple and Window-based software is created to work under client-server environment. The software is useful for all types of libraries which include all modules of libraries i.e. IJAAR Vol. 6 No. 39 ISSN – 2347-7075 Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb 154 Acquisition, Cataloguing, Circulation, Serials Control, OPAC and Administration. The software provides data transfer and also the exchange the data like international standards such as MARC 21. Also it has the facility of query management software for useful and well-organized treatment of queries from its users. E resources based subscription consortia-based The Centre has developed two consortia, namely UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium and N-LIST to wider access to e-resources to universities and colleges. Two separate consortia were established to provide to the various needs of universities and colleges, to assure the necessities of various funding sources. Following is a brief description of the two consortia UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium : The UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium was inaugurated by Dr. A.P. J. Abdul Kalam, in December 2003. The Consortium provides not only the recent but also archival access to more than 8,000 core and peer reviewed e journals and 11 bibliographic databases from 28 publishers including university presses, scholarly societies, commercial publishers and aggregators in different subjects. This consortium has two phases. 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. In the second phase, 50 more universities were added to the programme in the year 2005 added universities got Internet connectivity through UGCINFONET programme. Up to now 206 universities that come under the purview of UGC have been provided differential access to subscribed e-resources. These e resources cover almost all subject disciplines Associate Membership Programme of the UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium achievement of UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium in the universities led to the demand for addition of the Consortium resources to the universities that are not under UGC. In 2009 the Centre has also initiated its Associate Membership Programme with an aim to enlarge access to eresources subscribed by the Consortium to the private universities and other research organizations also. Under the associate member of the consortium now 177 members are there. INFLIBNET N-LIST: The Project "National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content (NLIST)", joint programme of UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium, INFLIBNET Centre and the INDEST AICTE Consortium, IIT Delhi, which provides for access to scholarly content to colleges, universities as well as centrally funded technical organizations through its four different parts, i.e. i. UGC-INFONET e-resources to technical institutions ii. INDEST e-resources to universities; iii. E-resources to Govt. / Govt. - aided as well as non-aided colleges iv. National Monitoring Agency at the INFLIBNET Centre to handle, access, examine, support and impart training to promote optimal usage of e-resources and for monitoring all activities involved in the process of providing successful and well-organized access to e-resources to colleges. The INFLIBNET Centre is responsible for developing and deploying suitable software tools and techniques for authenticating authorized users so as to facilitate them to access e-resources. The N- IJAAR Vol. 6 No. 39 ISSN – 2347-7075 Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb 155 LIST programmes subscribes to Web of Science for universities, Annual Reviews (33 journal titles), Taylor and Francis (1079 titles) JSTOR (2500 titles), Nature (27 journal titles), Project Muse (400+ journal titles) and more than one lakhs e books provided. The N-LIST programme covers almost all subjects it covers all relevant such as arts & humanities, social sciences, physical and chemical sciences, life sciences, computer sciences, political sciences, library and information science, law, business, mathematics, statistics, etc. E-resources recognized for cross subscription for universities and technical organizations are being made accessible to the beneficiary institutions on their respective IP address. The users from colleges can access e-resources and download full text articles. INFLIBNET Centre as an Identity Provider (IDP) by the publishers as Service Provider (SP). The NLIST programme, formally launched by the then Honorable Union MHRD, Shri Kapil Sibal on 4th May, 2010 has total registered member of 3,328 colleges as on June 1, 2013, including 3,031 eligible colleges that are already getting access to resources subscribed under the N-LIST programme. Log in IDs and password has been issued to the members institutions for the access of database. Open Access Initiatives by the INFLIBNET Center: ShodhGanga: A Reservoir of Indian Theses: ShodhGanga is a digital repository of e version of dissertations by researchers from various universities in India and it is available on the internet as a open source any one can access from anywhere. With the help of this repository research students gets the information about the all over research and also they can share their theses and dissertations. The ShodhGanga Website provides all important information to the, research students and university the authorities with regard to ETDs including their responsibilities, access policies, submission process, metadata structure, etc. As on 1st June, 2013, 118 universities have signed MOU with the center and from the 133 universities researcher’s students submitted their theses into the repository. And now total number of theses submitted into the repository has grown to 7,606. Shodhgangotri: For the registration of Ph. D the Synopsis are submitted to Indian Universities, Shodhgangotri is a new scheme that compliments “ShodhGanga”. While ShodhGanga is a repository of full text theses submitted to universities in India, “Shodhgangotri” contain approved synopsis of research topic submitted to the universities in India by research students. Under the new initiative called “Shodhgangotri”, research students in universities are requested to submit softcopy of approved synopsis submitted by research students to the universities for registering under the Ph.D. programme. The repository, Not only expose the trends and guidelines of research being conducted in Indian universities; but also it helps in to avoid duplication of research. Institutional Repository INFLIBNET Centre has developed an institutional repository which is IR@INFLBNET by using, open source software i.e. Dspace and easily accessible at (http://ir.inflibnet.ac.in/.) PDF of research papers published in the proceedings of the CALIBER and PLANNER, are uploaded in to the repository. It also includes newspaper clippings, course materials, etc. Now the repository has 1,274 full-text articles. VIDWAN: Subject Expert DatabaseIt is a database of profiles of researchers and other IJAAR Vol. 6 No. 39 ISSN – 2347-7075 Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb 156 faculty members working at leading academic institutions and other R & D institutions those who are concerned in teaching and research in India. This database provides full information about experts. In the year 1999 the University Expert Database was launched, which contains profiles of various subject expert serving in the universities and other academic institutions in India. In the year 2001, with the financial support from NISSAT the Centre developed another database called Expert Database in Science and Technology. DSIR that contained profiles of experts working in the R & D organizations, particularly in science and technology areas. These two databases were merged in the year 2012 and renamed as VIDWAN: Expert Database. Now the database contains around 9,000+ profiles of the subject experts from 650 institutions. Info-Port: It is a Subject Gateway to all Indian scholarly contents. It has scholarly content scattered over the Internet throughout an included interface that support search, look through and several listing of more than 1,700 e-resources. As a hosting platform the Info Portal uses “Subject Gateway Management System (SGMS)” The SGMS, designed Centre, facilitates entry of Internet resources and extending its access to users. E-PG Pathshala: A Gateway to All PG Courses National Mission on education through ICT the INFLIBNET center has given the work to develop e-content for the PG level students funded by MHRD it involved total 77 subjects and this programme is called e-PG Pathshala. Center is having the full responsibility of this project. Improvement of e contents in 35 subjects has previously been started. In addition, the Centre has taken the task for content creation for two more subjects one is. Library Science and other one is Information Technology The plan for carrying out of projects under e-PG Pathshala and as well as guidelines for content writers along with templates for content creation was developed and approved by the UGC.With all this different types of efforts INFLIBNET has coordinated as a valuable contribution to develop the academic libraries of universities and the colleges. Commissions and Policies about the Academic Libraries: Generally commissions are high-level bodies constituted by the Government for studying some detailed problems and recommending actions to get solve the problems. Such as of national level or specific, such as pinpointed to a Department or organization. Committees, on the other hand, are smaller bodies, which are generally set up by the Government Departments and autonomous organizations for certain specific purposes. National Policy on Libraries and Information Services and System: Policy is the only way to direct, manage and develop library and information service in a country and when it is formulated at national level it is called national Policy. In our country the national policy on library and information system and services is formulates by Raja Ram Mohan Roy foundation, Calcutta and Indian Library association (ILA). The department of culture, Government of India set up a committee on national policy in 1985. The final report was submitted to the Government in 1986.Prof. D.P. Chattopadhyay was the chairman of the committee. Objective:  To improve existing facilities in the field of library and information science.  To collect information concerning with technical, Scientific and other progressive activities of the country IJAAR Vol. 6 No. 39 ISSN – 2347-7075 Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb 157  Improvement and development of existing information technology which are being used presently.  Promote the storage and use of national and foreign resources of information which are needed to satisfy the present and future needs of information of the country.  Automation of Libraries  To develop and use of efficient tool and technologies of information handling.  To encourage Co-operation  To provide financial support to libraries Recommendation: 1. To established and maintain free public library network 2. Every establish school and college should have library along with its qualifies librarian 3. Expansion of national, regional sectors and local levels of NISSAT in the country. 4. System similar to NISSAT should be established in social science, humanities and languages also 5. Development of information system and data bank 6. To promote specialized information personnel’s for applying modern management techniques for information service. 7. National library act should be enacted to meet information needs of society and it should be supplemented by model library legislation at state level. 8. To access and use various information technologies for enhancing the existing service and for optimum exploitation and utilization of available resources. 9. All the barriers should be removed from free flow of information being information resources for easy access and use. 10. Parental bodies of libraries should be committed to provide support and in infrastructure for libraries. 11. A national commission should be set up for libraries and information systems which will consider the problems related with library profession of national level. 12. A national commission should be set up for libraries and information systems which will consider the problems related with library profession of national level. 13. National library of India at Calcutta should be strengthened National Knowledge Commission (NKC): National knowledge commission has established under the chairmanship Mr. Sam Pitroda has given some recommendations regarding the libraries in higher education as follows. 1. Set up National Commission on libraries should be set up by the government. 2. To launch the process in mission mode a national mission on libraries should be set up immediately, for a period of three years (NMLIS) the mission should subsequently be connected into a permanent commission. 3. Prepare a national census of all libraries. 4. Revamp LIS education, training and research facilitiesnational institute of advance training and R & D in LIS (suggested name Indian institute of library and Information Science (ILIS) 5. Re-assess staffing of libraries. 6. Modernize library management 7. Promote ICT applications in all libraries. 8. Facilitate donation and maintenance of private collection IJAAR Vol. 6 No. 39 ISSN – 2347-7075 Dr. Shinde Neeta Bhausaheb 158 9. To suggest decentralized models for identifying documenting and preserving private collection. Conclusion: In conclusion, the UGC has been a catalyst for change, moving academic libraries in India toward a future where they are technologically advanced, well-resourced, and professionally managed. Its strategic planning, financial support, and emphasis on professional and digital development have cemented the library's role as the intellectual and academic heart of any higher education institution. The UGC's role in the development of academic libraries in India has been multifaceted and profound. 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