The present student community prefers screen reading to print reading and to cater to this preference, the college initiated a distinctive practice called Digital Resource Pool. This is a repository of e-books in each faculty members’ collection, their study notes, video or audio lectures, etc and made available on the college website for students to access and download at their own convenience. These e-resource collections, grouped and labelled systematically, can be used by our students and other students because their links are provided in the college website, student WhatsApp groups and display boards in the form of hyperlinks or QR codes

Objectives

The objectives of this practice are:

• To encourage millennials to cultivate wider reading habit
• To make unavailable books available on online platforms
• To move with the trend of the hour that knowledge is at fingertips. (Library goes to students, instead of students go to library)
• Inculcate resource sharing habit.
Knowledge updating.
• To ease all constraints of visiting and loaning from a physical library.
Minimizing economic divide in the acquisition of knowledge.

The Context

It is a fact that the reading culture of the new generation is less than that of the generations before. Though many factors are accountable for this, the major reason seems to be their infatuation with electronic gadgets. They spend a considerable amount of time on such devices. Besides students have a tendency to resort to the online materials whenever they are expected to do any assignments or academic tasks.

The introduction of LMS and online platforms to the teaching-learning process by our teachers met with a warm welcome and enthusiastic response from the student community. In addition, most of the teachers have collection of digital resources related to their area of expertise and interests. Moreover, many students are not well versed in locating exact information from the right online sources. All these facts made the college think of opening a digital repository for the benefit primarily of students and the teachers as well.

The Practice

To materialize this project the following steps are taken:

• Each faculty member enriches their online resource collection by adding more items useful for students. They may add their own lectures, video lessons, video lessons by other experts, e-books prescribed in the curriculum, study materials like notes, solved question papers, videos of easy solutions, etc.
• Faculty members upload these resources to either their personal cloud storage or college website.
• Faculty members organize their resources under various heads that will help the students locate the information required easily
• The links to the major categories and individual items, if possible are created and communicated to the students through Class WhatsApp groups, display boards etc.
• Faculty members encourage students to go online whenever they are to do assignments and other academic exercises.
• Faculty members provide specific links to specific resources/s whenever required (eg. video lesson)
• Uniqueness: This practice of bringing the students to the online platform made our tasks much easier and could involve more learners to academic exercise.
• During the covid -19 lockdown season this practice immensely helped both students and faculty members. The college could face the pandemic season without compromising the academic quality much.