An e-library project led by the international NGO Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) is providing instant access to resources across all disciplines for unlimited number of students to use the same book or journal at the same time.
For over a year now, 166,000 students and 4,000 academic staff at seven universities in Myanmar have had round-the-clock access to more than 10,000 scholarly journals and 130,000 academic books.
The online resources have been in high demand, with tens of thousands of downloads since the digital libraries started in 2014. The project comes at a time of major reconstruction of higher education in Myanmar as the country opens up to the outside world after half a century of isolation.
For universities, the impact of being cut off from the international community was devastating with scholarship and teaching stagnated; university infrastructure decayed; library collections were limited, out of date, and books were falling apart.
The universities of Yangon and Mandalay, Dagon University, Yadanabon University, Yangon University of Economics, West Yangon University, and East Yangon University have laid new high-speed fibre optic cables and now have Wi-Fi in their libraries. Some have extended their opening hours to meet demand. The rest of Myanmar's 164 universities are eager to join the e-library project and are upgrading their infrastructure.
E-library switch-on required training for librarians, academics and students at all seven universities, such as on basic computer literacy and advanced online research. Introductory training includes how to access the e-libraries using mobile devices, how to save materials in personal online libraries and how to link to teaching materials and reading lists. More advanced training includes building awareness about the best e-resources for individual subject areas and how to use them.
Scholars in Myanmar are keen to offer the world their own content. The key is open access — unrestricted online access to peer-review scholarly research, a concept widely known internationally but little known in Myanmar. Since learning about open access, the universities of Mandalay and Yangon have formed working groups to plan the development of institutional repositories and draft open access policies.
