Six more universities have joined the EIFL eLibrary Myanmar project as part of an agreement between EIFL and the Myanmar Department of Higher Education to further develop university libraries and contribute to Myanmar’s national strategy for higher education reform.

EIFL’s work in Myanmar is made possible by the Open Society Foundations Higher Education Support Programme.

The expanded EIFL eLibrary Myanmar project will impact on the lives of many more students, teachers, scholars, researchers and librarians. The project now includes 13 universities with over 205,000 students who have access to EIFL-negotiated e-resources,  including journals, e-books and databases, made available to their libraries at vastly reduced rates.

The EIFL eLibrary Myanmar project was created in 2013 to enable libraries at universities under the control of the Ministry of Education to provide effective support for teaching, research and learning. There are 158 universities in Myanmar under the Ministry. After years of isolation, their libraries had very limited print collections, and no universities had access to online resources at the start of the project.

In addition to increasing access to e-resources and providing training, EIFL is working with the Department of Higher Education to create more open access institutional repositories for research output at partner universities, and is continuing with joint efforts to integrate e-resources into teaching and research.

Six new university partners

• The six universities that are joining the project are
• Yangon Technological University (YTU) and Mandalay Technological University (MTU)
• University of Computer Studies, Yangon (UCSY) and University of Computer Studies, Mandalay (UCSM)
• Two universities from outside the major economic regions of Yangon and Mandalay -
  • Sittwe University is located in Sittwe, capital of Rakhine State, in Western Myanmar, and
  • Mawlamyine University is located in Mawlamyine, capital of Mon State in southwestern Myanmar.

Boosting tourism

In 2017/18 EIFL’s work in Myanmar also expanded to include two degree colleges under the Myanmar Ministry of Hotels and Tourism: National Management College (NMDC), Yangon, and Mandalar Degree College (MDC), Mandalay.

The expansion was made possible by LuxDev, the Luxembourg funding and development agency, who are implementing projects to support the Myanmar Tourism Master Plan 2013-2020. The plan aims to boost hospitality and tourism’s contribution to national employment and income generation by building human resources capacity and improving service quality in the tourism sector.

The two degree colleges are benefiting from highly discounted access to e-resources, negotiated by EIFL, and training.