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.