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HEC to provide 40,000 e-books through digital library
ISLAMABAD, June 14(Dawn): The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has decided to
provide 40,000 online books in addition to 23,000 journals that have been made
available through the digital library programme.
The e-books support
programme will allow researchers to access most of the important text and
reference books electronically in a variety of subject areas.
The HEC has
acquired 40,000 electronic books of world's leading publishers that cater to the
specific needs of the public and private Universities and R&D organizations,
participating in the programme.
According to a pres release issued by the
HEC, the main objective of the whole effort is to support and strengthen the
learning activities of students in Pakistan. The students, faculty and staff
will have access to e-books and all of the powerful research technologies
offered through this platform.
Over 220 leading international publishers
have been identified for the access including Oxford University Press, Taylor
and Francis, Blackwell Synergy, BMJ publishing Group, Cambridge University
Press, Emerald, John Wiley & Sins, The McGraw Hill Book Companies, MIT
Press, Springer Publishing Company, Stanford University Press and Sybex Inc,
United Nations University Press etc. containing a collection of over 40,000
e-books in varied disciplines, such as Business and Management, Information
Technology, Engineering, Health and Biomedical, Life and Physical Sciences,
Social Sciences, etc.
It is anticipated that students at undergraduate
and graduate levels will greatly benefit from this powerful new service which
will provide a tremendous source of important information to the student
community.
Pakistan will thus become one of the first few countries in
the world in which the entire student community in the universities will be
given free access to a huge reservoir of knowledge. This represents an important
and a historic step by HEC to improve the quality of education in our
universities, and reduce the cost burden of higher education on
students.
The salient features of the service include automatic save
links to highlights, bookmarks and notes and storing them in personal
bookshelves. The bookshelves can be shared by patrons, teaching staff, and
administrators and items can be deleted at any time. Moreover, infoTools
instantly links patrons from the full-text to other content within Ebrary
databases, online resources within the subscribing library (federated search
engines, ILS, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and third party databases),
information on the web such as definitions, translations, maps, web search
engines, and bibliographical information. InfoTools also allows patrons to
highlight, annotate bookmark, print, copy and paste text from any document into
any text application, complete with customisable bibliographical citations. The
browsing options include navigating pages in the book with the requested search
terms or flip through pages using the arrow buttons, unlimited users and
browsing through a particular subject area. The service has user-friendly
searching options. It includes searching everything in a book by entering text
in one field, refining search results using the search results page, searching
for words and phrases that are close to each otter and exploring from within a
book, resources in the library, and on the Web. The advance search options
include Text, Author, Title, Subject, ISBN, Abstract, Years of Publication and
Keyword.
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