Bridging Information Divide among Health Science Libraries in Punjab: A Health Science Library Network System

摘要

Information is a vital part of our society and an integral part of everybody's everyday life like food, air and shelter. We need information and its resources for minor and significant decision making. In this age of information society, there is huge amount of information and its resources available on each and every subject field. The new technologies like World Wide Web and Internet are playing major role in increasing the number of documents and easy accessibility to its users. Though, the open source movement is on full swing and some of the publishers of the world have started publishing free of cost and make the documents available on public domain, but the cost of most of the information resources is also hiking day-by-day specially the health science information resources. The organizations like health sciences institutions are mostly dependent on health science information resources for their educational and research oriented activities. The day-by-day increase in the prices of these resources by 0w publishers and deplete levels of financial resources of libraries has led to the problem of information divide especially in the developing countries. Only networking of group of libraries for the purposes of cooperative purchase and sharing of their resource can be the best solution to this problem. This present paper highlights the initiative taken by the Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, Faridkot for the establishment of network of an affiliated college libraries i.e. Health Science Libraries Network (HSLIBNET).