Library E-Resources at Your Doorsteps: A Study Based on INFLIBNET’s INFED Access

Globally, during the lockdown due to the Covid pandemic, the library services are a challenging one that changed both the publishers’ and librarians’ outlook, which resulted in the maximum utilization of library electronic resources through remote login. This study aims to analyze the universities in India utilizing e-resources through the INFED facility. It seeks to analyze region-wise, category-wise and state-wise access of INFED by different universities across the country. Data was collected directly from the INFED website. A total of 171 institutions were identified as member institutions in INFED till 1st February 2021.Out of these 171 member institutions, 101 institutions identified as universities were taken for the present study. It is surprising to note that only 10.44% of the Indian universities are using the INFED facility. The lion’s share of universities (89.56%) is not using the INFED technology. INFED accessing universities were also broken down by region and category wise and it is found that universities in the South (38.61 %) and North (32.67%) are more accessing than universities in other regions and regarding the category-wise analysis, state universities (45.54 %) are accessing more. The region-wise university analysis shows that despite the fact that the number of universities is higher in Northern region (336) than Southern region (201), the higher the number of universities joined in INFED is from Southern region (4.03%). Tamil Nadu (14.85 %) and Karnataka (12.87 %) states have more INFED accessing universities and furthermore these states are located in the Southern zone. The top five institutions in the NIRF ranking are the two universities from the Southern and three universities from the Northern region, including three Central, one Deemed and one State university