E-Commerce Trends in the Dissemination of Scholarly Information: Impact on modern hybrid and digital libraries in India

The advancements in information technology laid an unimaginable impact on the production as well as the supply of scholarly resources, structuring of libraries; and also on the user’s information seeking behavior and their expectations. E-publishing activities have not only reduced the publishing time but also providing seamless access to numerous scholarly resources from varied types of sources instantly and simultaneously to multiple institutions/users. The transformation paved way for spreading several applications globally in almost all the sectors including e-commerce, the trend in turn has been influencing the entire human lifestyle worldwide, including the libraries. Among stake holders of information industry, the publishers, aggregators and intermediary agencies are concerned with the production, development, formatting and sale of the information resources, whereas the libraries are service oriented organizations, though not pricing their conventional services or resources, they adopt various functionalities regarding their exclusive collections and various other user centric services. The paper discusses the general features and applications highlighting the impact on dissemination of scholarly information, distribution of resources and libraries/digital libraries and their services.