Necessity of E-journals in library and education system:
The advantages of e-journals are well discussed all over the world. E-journals have some unique features and advantages that popularized the journals around the globe. Some of the advantages of e-journals are as:
- Low cost: As we all know in a developing country like Bangladesh or India where cost is always important and considerable factor. Usually printed journals are costly. Most of the libraries of this country can’t afford to subscribe print journals owing to financial crisis and some of them subscribe very selective print journals. Due to low cost of the e-journals, many libraries toke the opportunities of subscribing e-journals.
- No more missing issues: In print journal subscription, missing issues are really a great problem in any developing country.in many case the publishers send the hard copy through postal service, which is not reached in the library or hand of the users. So it causes problem both the subscriber and the supplier. Furthermore, the hard copy of a journal can be missed or lost by the theft. E-journal is the only solution to prevent such crime.
- Overcome time, distance and access barriers: Very often, the print journal reaches vary late from the foreign country to the developing country whereas the subscribers can get e-journals timely and users of e-journals can read any article or paper at any time.
- Multiple accesses: In an organizational or institutional library multiple accesses to resources are necessary to save the time of the users. E-journals provide multiple access facilities and users can have the accessibility in the same journal at the same time.
- Wide search option: The articles of e-journal can be encoded with “metatags” which allow more sophisticated searching techniques.
- Instant download, updated and stored easily: The basic benefits of e-journal is that any information of any article of any specific journal can be downloaded instantly. Besides e-journals are easily updated and stored, the information professionals and users of any developing country will be capable of handling e-journals.
- Save physical space and human resources: E-journal saves the space of the journal section of the library, because it requires no space and it does not require human resources for shelving and rectification. Thus journals can save the money of the library and Information Institute in any developing country.