Online Access to Foreign/International Databases

Abstract

Author

The tremendous growth of literature in various fields of knowledge and the ever.increasing costs of publications have forced the libraries/information centres to curtail the acquisition of publications. Inflation adds to the gravity of this problem, resulting in reduced purchasing power of the library budgets. Therefore, libraries have to find alternative ways to provide access to publications/documents. Libraries/technical information centres (TICS) are adopting mainly two methods to ensure access for their users: (i) inter-library cooperation and (ii) providing access to well known databases. While cooperation among the libraries in the form of inter-library loan of documents and avoiding duplication of purchase of costly publications is an age-old practice, providing access to the databases is a recent development.The paper discusses some of the concepts of database systems and presents an instructional database used by students in the course.