International Information systems and Networks

INIS (International Nuclear Information System)

INIS sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Vienna started functioning in 1970. It is a cooperative, decentralized computerised abstracting and indexing system providing worldwide coverage of the literature on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The salient features of INIS are: international IR system, cooperative venture communication with participants, maximum- decentralisation and minimum centralisation, adherence to standards and rules, computer-based system, a document retrieval system, use of thesaurus for subject indexing, indexing and abstracting service with a high quality input, a dynamic and flexible system, machine readable information service, and a mission-oriented system. The INIS Atom index an magnetic tapes received from the headquarters by the national centres is used for offering current awareness, SDI service, etc. according to local information needs. India has been actively participating in INIS from the beginning: The Library and Information Services Division of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre; Bombay, is the national centre responsible for INIS activities.

AGRIS (International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology)

AGRIS, the International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology, was started in 1974 by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations. AGRIS became fully operational in 1975 with the first issue of AGRINDEX and was modeled on the INIS pattern to facilitate information exchange and to bring together the world literature dealing with all aspects of agriculture.

AGRIS was established with the following objectives:

• Creation of a single, comprehensive, current inventory of world-wide agricultural literature reflecting agricultural research results, food production, rural development and to help users to identify problems concerning all aspects of world food supply,
• Meeting the information requirements of users requiring agricultural information by offering specialised subject retrieval services, providing documents on request, current awareness and selective dissemination of information services, and
• Collaborating with new and existing specialised secondary information services so as to increase efficiency and eliminate unnecessary duplication.’’

§  WebAGRIS: It covers the current and ongoing agricultural information projects in AGRIS and CARIS and is considered as networking for AGRIS in the future.

§  AGRIS AP : AGRIS Application Profile (AP) gives the Guidelines for Description of Information Objects for the International Information System on Agricultural Sciences and Technology.

§  AGROVOC: AGROVOC is the multilingual international agricultural thesaurus. The terms are in English, French and Spanish.

INSPEC

INSPEC, started in the year 1967 as an outgrowth of the Science Abstracts service, by the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), United Kingdom. Presently it is one of the leading bibliographic information services available in English-language. It provides access to the world’s scientific and technical literature in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, communications, control engineering, computers and computing, and information technology.

INSPEC is available in a wide range of products:

§  Electronic Form : This includes

·   Online database for remote access to information from INSPEC Inspec Ondisc (CD-ROM)

·        Inspec Archive - Electronic Access to Science Abstracts 1898 to 1968

·        Inspec Web

§  Abstracting Journals :Physics Abstracts, Electrical and Electronics Abstracts and Computer and Control Abstracts together form the Science Abstracts series of journals from IEE. These journals together contain almost all of the 350,000 or more short summaries of published articles which also appear annually in the INSPEC database.

§  INSPEC Services:

· Document Delivery Service-Publications indexed by INSPEC are warehoused for this service.

·    IEL - IEEE/IEE Electronic Library full-text of IEEE and IEE publications with INSPEC index.

· Electronic Materials Information Service (EMIS) giving data and background text on the properties and technology of semiconductors.

MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System)

The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is located in the campus of NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. NLM is one of the largest medical libraries of the world. Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) was established in 1964 as a computerised storage and retrieval system at the NLM. It provides  bibliographic access to the NLM’s large biomedical literature collection. It became functional with the first computer produced issue of Index Medicus. MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine’s bibliographic database, covers the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. MEDLINE can be accessed through PubMed and the NLM Gateway. PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, contains over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950’s. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed has links to many sites providing full- text articles and other related resources.

 BIOSIS

BIOSIS, provided by Thompson Scientific. It is serving the life science community by providing researchers, students, and librarians with references to research published and found in journal articles, conference proceedings, meetings, patents, book chapters and other sources of information.

BIOSIS Products and Databases

·    Biological Abstracts (BA) : Usually referred to as an index to theworld’s life sciences journal literature, BA is an abstracting journal that covers articles from over 3,700 journals from all over the world and from subjects like botany, pharmacology, biochemistry, ecology and other biological areas.

·  BIOSIS Previews : This is a comprehensive index to life sciences and biomedical research. BIOSIS Previews contains citations from Biological Abstracts (BA), and Biological Abstracts/ Reports, Reviews, and Meetings (BA/RRM) (formerly BioResearch Index).

·    BIOSIS Search Guide : An essential tool for all users of the BIOSIS databases.

·        Basic BIOSIS : Life science database for students new to research

ERIC (Education Resources Information Center)

The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences of the United States Department of Education. The mission of ERIC is to provide a comprehensive, easy-touse, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information for educators, researchers, and the general public. Education research and information are essential to improving teaching, learning, and educational decision-making. To help users find the information they are seeking, ERIC produces a controlled vocabulary, the Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors.

OCLC (Online Computer Library Centre)

In the year 1967 OCLC (Ohio College Library Centre) was founded to develop a computerised system, OCLC emerged as an international network from a regional computer system for 50 Ohio Colleges. In the year 1981, the name of OCLC, was changed to Online Computer Library Centre. The founder is Frederick G. Kilgour and the headquater at Dublin,Ohio US. Present President and CEO is Skip Prichard. The main objective of the OCLC is to have more access to information and reduce costs by offering services to libraries and users. The vision of the OCLC is to be a leading global library cooperative, helping libraries, and users with economic access to knowledge through innovation and collaboration.

The following are some of the OCLC services :

· Cataloguing and Metadata Service provides online cataloguing, copy cataloguing, record supply and collection sets, etc.

·    Collection Management service helps in achieving the collection goals of the member libraries

·        Digital collection and preservation service is designed to protect and share the digital collection.

    FirstSearch is the powerful reference service for locating references and full text articles.

·    World Cat : The world's largest bibliographic database, Operated by OCLC. Many OCLC services are based on WorldCat. It lists resources from stone tablets to e-resources and MP3s, DVD and websites. It provides libraries with rich source of cataloguing records. As of February 2021, WorldCat contained over 512 million bibliographic records in 483 languages, representing over 3 billion physical and digital library assets, and the WorldCat persons dataset (mined from WorldCat) included over 100 million people.

RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network)

RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) is a bibliographic information system, developed by the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The Research Libraries Group (RLG) was a U.S.-based library consortium that existed from 1974 until its merger with the OCLC library consortium in 2006. The members of RLG use RLIN system for cataloguing, authority work and archives and manuscript processing. RLIN also refers to a computer interface program that is used to work with RLG’s bibliographic records for finding, creating, maintaining, and contributing records in RLG union catalogue. RLIN included bibliographic data representing JACKPHY (non-Roman) scripts. RLIN was generally used only by library specialists; in 1993 RLG developed Eureka as a user-friendly interface for use by non-librarians.

National Information systems and Networks

NISCAIR (National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources) :

NISCAIR came into existence on October 1, 2002, following the merger of two CSIR institutions viz. Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (INSDOC) and National Institute of Science Communication (NISCOM). In 2021, the institute was merged with National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies to form National Institute of Science Communication and Policy Research. Two important current National Level Projects of NISCAIR viz.TKDL and NSDL. 

• Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL):  Recognising the need for and importance of documenting the existing knowledge, available in public domain on various traditional systems of
  medicines, NISCAIR (Under CSIR), AYUSH (Department of Ayurveda, Yoga, and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy) and DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion) collaborated to establish Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) on Ayurveda. TKDL includes search interface providing full-text search and retrieval of TK information on International Patent Classification (IPC) and keywords in multiple languages.
  
• National Science Digital Library (NSDL):  Under NSDL Project, electronic access to digital resources of curriculum related material in science and technology will be provided to students in
  remote areas. NSDL will be implemented by NISCAIR with the active participation of UGC and Ministry of Human Resource Development. In the first phase, NSDL will cover the students of undergraduate level in Indian universities and colleges.

DESIDOC(Defence Scientific Information and Documentation Centre):
DESIDOC started functioning in 1958 as Scientific Information Bureau (SIB). It was a division of the Defence Science Laboratory (DSL) which is presently called as Laser Science & Technology Centre (LASTEC). The Defence Scientific Information & Documentation Centre (DESIDOC) is a division of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) which had its beginning in 1948 became a division of Scientific Information Bureau (SIB) in 1959. The present director of DESIDOC is Dr K Nageswara Rao. DESIDOC maintains the Defence Science Library (DSL) is headed by Sh. Tapesh Sinha, a well-equipped library housing 262,000 documents. It also provides access to various databases, and other reference material.

Publications :

• Defence Science Journal
• DRDO Newsletter
• DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology (earlier DESIDOC Bulletin of Information Technology (DBIT).

SENDOC (Small Enterprises National Documentation Center) :

SENDOC was set up in 1970 at Small Industries Extension Training Institute (now known as National Institute of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises), Hyderabad, to revitalize the micro, small and medium enterprises in India and developing countries by providing their required information. The objectives of the Centre are to collect, store and disseminate techno-managerial information pertaining to MSMEs and to conduct need and demand based training programmes. The libraryof the SENDOC possesses 70,000 books, 18,000 back volumes of journals, 30,000 reports and others.

Some of the important services provided by the Centre are:

Inter-library lending of documents

Lending of books

Reference Services (preparation of bibliographies) and literature search

Newspaper clippings (on select items)

Technical enquiry

Reprographic Services

ENVIS(Environmental Information System) :

Recognising the importance of environmental information for sustainable development and formulation of environmental management polices, Government of India set up ENVIS in 1982 under the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF). Long-term and short-term objectives of ENVIS Programme are as follows :

    Long-term objectives:

• To build up a repository and dissemination centre in Environmental +Science and Engineering;
  
• To gear up the modem technologies of acquisition, processing, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information of environmental nature; and
  
• To support and promote research, development and innovation in environmental information technology.

    Short-term objectives:

• To provide national environmental information service relevant to present needs and capable of development to meet the future needs of the users, originators,processors and disseminators of information;
  
• To build up storage, retrieval and dissemination capabilities with the ultimate objective of dissemination of information speedily to the users;
  
• To promote national and international co-operation and liaison for exchange of environment related information;
• To promote exchange of information amongst developing countries.

INFLIBNET: Information and Library Network

INFLIBNET is helping in automation and modernization of university library system. It is providing universities high-speed line for accessing e-journals. It has become a major player in enhancing scholarly communication in India. INFLIBNET development was started under University Grant Commission (UGC) India in 1991. Initially it was started as a project under Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA). INFLIBNET became an independent Inter University Centre in 1996. The headquarter of INFLIBNET is situated in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The present director is Prof J P Singh Joorel. Primary objectives of INFLIBNET are :

• To promote and establish communication facilities to improve capabilities in information transfer and access, that provide support to scholarship, learning, research etc.
  
• To linking libraries and information centres in universities, deemed to be universities, colleges, UGC information centres, institutes of national importance, R&D institutions etc. Avoiding duplication of efforts.
  

Activities :

• The Centre has developed Windows based library management software named 'SOUL'. The library automation package 'SOUL' is installed and required training is provided. 'SOUL' has been well received by the university libraries.
• UGC is modernising universities campuses with the state-of-the art campus wide network and setting up its own nation wide communication network named UGC-INFONET.
  
• The Centre also assists participating libraries in database development, develop utility tools for retrospective conversion of union catalogues, develop software tools for multilingual database of union catalogue, etc.
  
• To enhance the skills of university library staff for implementation of INFLIBNET Programme, Centre conducts several training programmes and workshops on 'the application of computers in libraries and information services'.
  
• INFLIBNET Centre in collaboration with different universities organises a national convention, 'CALIBER' (Convention on Automation of Libraries in Education and Research) every year.
  

DELNET: Developing Library Network

DELNET (Developing Library Network) earlier known as Delhi Library Network till 2001 started in the year 1988 and registered as a society in 1991. Initially, it was sponsored by NISSAT, DSIR and currently is being promoted jointly by National Informatics Centre (NIC), Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India and India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi. Delnet (http://www.delnet.nic.in) provides ILL Online, Retrospective conversion, Referral Services, Document Delivery Services, Training Programmes, Creation and Maintenance of Bibliographic Databases, E-mail Service, and Internet Connectivity Service. Apart from these services, DELNET provides some useful software products namely 

DELSIS – a powerful library networking software;             DEL-DOS –for creating MARC (Machine Readable Catalogue) Records of books; NICNET(National Informatics Centre Network): NICNET stands for National Informatics Centre Network. NICNET, has institutional linkages across all the Ministries /Departments of the Central Government, State Governments, Union Territories, and District administrations of the country. National Informatics Centre (NIC) is an institution under the Government of India. NIC was established in 1976 under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. It provides solutions in the area of e-governance particularly for the sectors that fall under Government of India. It supports NICNET. NICNET produced the enabling facilities for supporting added activities, projects and programmes in the special work areas. ERNET (Education and Research Network) ERNET stands for Education and Research Network. The Research & Development projects are initiated by ERNET groups. The core groups of ERNET have worked towards the development of products and technology transfer to the industry. The following are some of the ongoing projects:

• Wide area Quality of Service Network Test bed
• Bringing Europe's electronics infrastructure to expanding frontiers
• Setting up of vocational centers for skill creation for the disabled children in the area of Information Technology
• Community Information Centres Vidyavahin(CICVVs)