Impact of E-resources on Budget Appropriation in Agricultural Libraries of Northern India

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A study was conducted to assess the proportion at which the budget is spent on acquisition of the print information resources (PIRs) and electronic information resources (EIRs) in academic libraries of India, so that we are able to understand the current trend in this regard across agricultural libraries of northern India. The survey method has been adopted as the method to conduct the study and questionnaire has been used as a main data collection tool for collection of data. The telephonic interaction and e-mail correspondence has also been used to seek clarifications, remove ambiguities and obtain data of higher significance. It is found that presently major chunk of the allocated budget is being spent on acquisition of print form of books and journals across all the seven libraries under scope of present study. As such the advent of e-books and e-journals seems to have not yet laid any prominent impact on budget appropriation. Though the libraries seem to have switched their focus towards e-journals than that of print, they are seen to avail their full text access through consortium subscribed platforms and do not afford to buy many e-journals of their own. The interest to subscribe bibliographical of abstract level databases, seems to have diminished across the libraries under study. Though the libraries are interested to procure good number and quality e-books the budgetary provisions do not support or allow them to fulfill this instinct. This is first work of its nature in northern India with domain as agricultural libraries. The findings will help the librarians and the financial authorities to make judicious allocation of budget and allow them to utilise it well in commensuration with the actual need.