Around 34,000 students and 10,000 faculty members from 70 medical and dental colleges affiliated to the Dr. N.T.R. University of Health Science in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been given online access to 5,294 journals and thousands of digital books through a gateway portal.
Inaugurating the portal at the University here on Monday Vice-Chancellor T. Ravi Raju said that Dr. N.T.R.Health University was the first in the country to extend the facility to all colleges including 220 nursing colleges affiliated to it.
He said that the University spends between Rs. 3 crore and Rs. 4 crore per annum to subscribe to the best of medical journals, but neither the students nor the faculty members were making proper use of them for various reasons. Number of books and computers were made available in all libraries as per the MCI norms, but many did not have the time to go to them. The usage in some colleges was ‘zero’, he said.
With the launching of the gateway portal this wealth of information could be accessed anywhere on the internet. Most students had internet on their smart phones so they could access it even at home. The users had to register in advance with their email identity to get a personalised password which they can change subsequently, he explained.
The new trend in the medical fraternity was the emergence of the ‘physician scientist’. “Research does not mean inventing things. It means having good statistics and making epidemiological surveys,” he said. Medicine was becoming more “individualised and personalised” depending on the genetic peculiarities of the local populations and doctors needed to be learning continuously.
Physician scientists were the need of the hour and students would need information at their finger tips to meet the challenges of modern medicine, the vice-chancellor explained. Health University Registrar S.Babu Lal, Director R & D G.Krishna Murthy, NTRMEDNET Consortium and digital library coordinator M.Jagan Mohan, ELSEVIER Editorial and Publishing Operations Director Ganesh Venkatesan and Consortium former coordinator Padmavathi Devi spoke.
