Pakistan's first leading Research University, the Information Technology University (ITU) library in collaboration with Quality Enhancement Cell (QEC) of the University organized a session on "Optimizing Information Searching and Retrieval Skills" here Friday, which was attended by a large number of academia, journalists, students and professionals from all walks of life.
Dr. Muhammad Ramzan, the architect of HEC's digital library, a leading researcher and information professional, a PhD in managing the leading libraries, Director QEC & Library being the resource person for the session briefed the participants regarding hand on training to search online databases to Find authentic and reliable information, identifying & refining search terms and using best search strategies, to stay on top of the literature in the respective field using automatic alerts, RSS feeds and tracking engines and discovering the ITU library's vast digital resources.
Dr. Ramzan said, "World's largest indexing database of electronic journals 'Scopus' a comprehensive but expensive database was being subscribed by a few universities in Pakistan and abroad. One of ITU's Sciento-metric labs uses this database for its research projects, he added. The participants were briefed regarding the research activity as human progress is always based on research and deals with the solutions of the problems. The flood of information on internet requires verification and authenticity check.
Information Technology University (ITU) Punjab has managed to extend access to 142,000 e-books through ITU digital library in Arfa Software Technology Park Campus. The online access to e-books covers a wide variety of content across all important subject areas and fields. This huge online source is an opportunity for optimum use by the students and other interested persons. Dr. Umar Saif founding Vice Chancellor of ITU while lauding the efforts of Quality Enhancement Cell, Library & Knowledge Center has directed to further increase the quality e-books relating to electronics, technology, economy and other important subjects for the benefit of the academia and students.
ITU's digital library provides access to more than 30,000 electronic journals dating back to 1800. IEEE explore is considered as one of the largest database of engineering and computer science journals, proceedings, and books are considered as bible for engineering sciences and technology. Students were also trained to use e-library that provides access to 160,000 full text electronic books. ITU has given free access to World's leading sites and its contents. The session was followed by Q & A session.