We are living through a time of great uncertainty, owing to the global coronavirus pandemic. To cope with regulations of social distancing and lockdown, our teachers have initiated online teaching. They have also been regularly uploading study materials on the University website.

In this spirit of online education, the University has also decided to open up free access to its digital collections. These would be accessible through the University website, https://www.culibrary.ac.in. There are two major reasons underlying our decision. The first is our responsibility to our students and our faculty, whose education and research have been obstructed by the prohibition on physical access to the library collections. The second is our responsibility, as a public institution, to the citizenry as well as the world at large. Education is a public good; and the necessity and value of academic research increases, more than ever, if our society is to recover from this crisis. As a public university, we feel that it is our responsibility to make our digital collections part of a global academic commons, to facilitate the pursuit of knowledge beyond borders.

Till now, the university library facilities and resources, including digital collections, were primarily accessible to users within the university campuses. Now, the digitized collection of full-text materials have been made accessible for free reading, from any part of the world.

A list of the digital resources is given below:

The University of Calcutta feels honoured to contribute to the commoning of cultural-educational resources: and thus to strengthen the global networks of cooperation and solidarity through which alone we shall be able to recover as a planetary community.

Vice-Chancellor
University of Calcutta