INDEST-AICTE Consortium: Present Services and Future Endeavours Jagdish Arora* and Kruti Trivedi INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad-380 009 *E-mail: jarora@inflibnet.ac.in ABSTRACT The INDEST-AICTE Consortium, launched in 2003, provides differential access to 12,000 electronic journals and six bibliographic databases from a number of publishers and aggregators to 48 centrally-funded technical institutions, 60 government and government-aided engineering colleges and 820 private engineering colleges, and other organisations. The article describes major functions, activities and services of the INDEST-AICTE Consortium. It briefly touches upon resources subscribed, terms of licenses, policies and practices for archival back-ups, membership programmes including core members, AICTE-supported institutions, and self-supported category of membership. The article outlines governing structures of the Consortium and their roles. It elaborates on strategies used for effective implementation of Consortia amongst member institutions. It briefly touches upon the economics of the Consortium and spells out it future endeavours. Keywords: INDEST-AICTE consortium, usage statistics, library consortium, cost avoidence, e-resources 1. INTRODUCTION The scholarly journals have suffered very high inflation in cost for the past several decades. The situation in India is compounded with continuous decline in the value of Rupee against major foreign currencies that resulted in steep decline in procurement of scientific journals by Indian libraries causing a very wide gap in journals that are required and those that are actually available in the libraries. All educational institutions in India, especially the universities, face acute shortage of funds to subscribe to international scholarly journals. It is estimated that a typical university in India subscribes to less than two hundred international journals. Moreover, some of the Indian universities do not subscribe to any international journals at all. While there are around 50,000 scholarly journals, all research institutions and universities in India put together had combined subscriptions to only around 1,500 journals in print till recently. Many smaller colleges and institutions subscribe to fewer than hundred journals. Most colleges, including those imparting postgraduate and doctoral programmes, do not have financial resources to subscribe to any international journals; their subscription list includes few Indian journals and a few popular magazines. However, the accessibility to international journals in Indian universities and technical institutions has improved many-fold with setting up of a few government-funded library consortia. Prior to setting up of these consortia, the access to e-journals was restricted to premier institutions like IISc, IITs, IIMs and a few central universities who were subscribing to a few e-resources including bibliographic databases on CD-ROM, a few e- journals accessible free with subscription to their print versions, and a negligible fraction of e-journals on subscription. After launch of the Indian National Digital Library in Engineering Sciences and Technology (INDEST) Consortium in 2003 and UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium in 2004, availability and accessibility of e- resources increased phenomenally in centrally-funded technical institutions (IITs, IISc, IIMs, IIITs, etc.) and universities, setting in a new culture of electronic access and browsing in academic institutions. Besides, INDEST- AICTE Consortium and UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium, a number of other library consortia have emerged in India in the past five to six years. These include Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) E-journals Consortium, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) Consortium, FORSA Consortium, Indian DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, Vol. 30, No. 2, March 2010, pp. 79-91 © 2010, DESIDOC Received on 30 December 2009 79