Trends in the Use of E-journals: A Case Study of PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh, Seema Vasishta, Dr. Navjyoti

Journals constitute an important part of a library collection being the most important vehicle for global scholarly communication. Tremendous developments in ICT in the recent years have given amazing boost to electronic publishing. As a result the information which is being generated at intense pace from all the directions world wide for all the themes is now being published in form of electronic journals (e-journals). Anyone with access to a computer equipped with a modem and suitable software can produce and distribute an e-journal through a computer network, thus journal publishing is being democratized. Usually, e-journals are published as electronic equivalents of their print counterparts but recently there is an increase in number of scholarly journals which are being published only electronically. As a result, e-journals have emerged as vital components of information resources of a library and play an imperative role in the distribution of prime information. E-journals have been defined in different ways by different authors. An early definition by McMillan (1991) described electronic journals as "any serials produced, published, and distributed via electronic networks such as Bitnet and the Internet." Ashcroft and Langdon (1999) stated that a journal, including indexing and abstracting services, provided by any electronic means, e.g. Internet, CD-ROM is called as e-journal. These journals are generally accessible electronically via web. Subsequently Smith (2003) gave a clear definition of e-journals as “any journal that is available online, including both electronic-only journals and journals that are available both electronically and in print”. E-journal, hence, is a term used to describe a periodical publication that is published in digital form to be displayed on a computer screen.