Institutional Repositories in India: A Case Study of National Aerospace Laboratories

This paper traces the history and developments in Open Archives Initiatives including open access journals, e-print archives and Institutional repositories. The setting up of NAL’s Institutional Repository using OSS GNU Eprints, document types with statistical analysis, country wise statistics of full text download, levels of accessibility and technologies used in building the Institutional Repository have been discussed at lengt

Know about E Affairs: Electronic Mail as Means of Electronic Communicationx201D;

The recent trends in communication has provided a large boost for electronic transactions and communication. It has become a legitimate and valuable means of communication. From the day when computers were first linked together through some form of a network, computer users have been sending messages to each other over the wires. As the Internet grew in the 1990s, so did the legitimacy of the Internet and e-mail communication. Electronic communication is a whole new world that offers more opportunities to interact, share information, and support one another, as a result E-business, e-commerce, and e-government have emerged

Institutional Repository at National Aerospace Laboratories

The Information Centre of NAL with its state-of-the-art expertise, infrastructure and services initiated setting up of its own repository during 2003 using, the then most popular open source software Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL). The work progressed rapidly with the adoption of the open source software GNU EPrints for archiving and managing the digital collections. This paper in detail explains the working model of NAL’s Institutional Repository. It discusses the technology employed and methodology adopted in building the same. The collection process of different data types, processing and depositing the same to IR is discussed in detail. It is summarized by providing the current status and the statistics on number of hits receive

Management of Internet Resources on Library HomePage : A special reference to NAL library homepage

The library profession is now heavily involved in providing access to information through library websites and it is a challenge to design a website that has reliable content and a user interface that is easy and intuitive to those who use it. As user acceptance and usability are major issues in the design of library websites this paper gives a view of creation of a model library website with special reference to NAL libray website

E-Publishing: Impact on Library and Information Services

The dawn of the printing press in 1452 ushered in an era of transposing movable type to paper that continues to this day. The emergence of desktop publishing in13; the mid 1980s as a viable alternative to traditional printing techniques may have diminished demand for those methods, but it hardly hindered the cachet associated with being published. If anything, the more immediate accessibility of publishing tools fed a desire among all writers to make their ideas available to the masses. By the early 1990x2019;s however, anyone could conceivably share it with the world via the Internet, which ultimately gave countless writers-in-search-ofpublishers a forum in which to share their work with others. Known as x201C;self13; publishingx201D; the process has turned the traditional publishing paradigm on its ear. When it comes to expressing our thoughts as vividly as we can, not only do we dare to dream, we move ahead, turning our dreams into reality by combining software, text, images, video, and sound to create dynamic expressions of our13; thoughts and knowledge

E-Resources management through portal: A case study of Technical Information Center

The heterogeneous nature of the documents both in terms of physical forms, types,sources of generation following different standards and that of users carrying both 13; research and development work demanding services suitable to them and co-existence of both old timers loving only print documents and younger scientists asking for documents on to their desk tops, the responsibility of information professionals is becoming much more challenging. The developments in information technology and their applications to library and information services have given new dimension to the entire spectrum of information management. The information generated is usually stored in four physical media: paper, film, optical, and magnetic disks. The e-document be it a book, journal, technical report, conference proceedings is portable; has random access to its contents; and the document can also be a multimedia object, in that it may contain not only text, but also graphics, drawings, photographs or video. Now we have the emergence of publications over the electronic networks and the activity took off in a big way following the invention of the World Wide Web. The Open Access movement is becoming the order of the day. More than 3000 journals are free on net for anybody to access. A number of Institutional repositories and e-Prints archives have thrown challenge to the publishing industry. . The developments in ICT have enabled the Information Centers to develop many innovative tools and techniques for acquiring, organizing, retrieving and disseminating knowledge sources, generating information services and marketing them to its clientele. 13; 13; Consortium approach through different pricing, management and licensing models is enabling the libraries to provide access to thousands of e-journals, e-books and other kinds of e-documents. The Information center at NAL with its state-of-the-art library has progressed a good deal in this direction by acquiring different kind of documents especially e-form, cataloguing amp; processing them appropriately, storing and giving access to its patrons not only in library premises, but on to the desk tops spread in three different campuses through laboratory LAN and also extending selected services through Internet for the benefit of any body from any part of the world. 13; Created and maintained by ICAST the Portal x2018;AeroInfox2019; (www.aeroinfo.org.in) serves as one window information search facility for Web sources in aerospace science and technology. This virtual library facilitates multiple approach to information seekers as the web sources are indexed and organised using different schemes of classification including NASA subject categories. Care is taken to cover Indian aerospace sources exhaustively. The ICAST site (www.icast.org.in), apart from giving detailed information about library sources including books, journals, E-journals, databases and technical reports makes available different search tools for its users. Other details like working hours, library rules, staff details, contact persons, etc are provided. One can submit an online query and suggest documents for acquisition using online forms provided. The Library Database (OPAC) is probably is single largest in the country with more than 3.25 lakh bibliographic records of books, technical reports, patents, standards, journals, etc.13; 13; ICAST users can search International databases like Aerospace Database, NTIS, J-Gate, Medline, etc through campus LAN. Users can access more than 2500 full text journals covering titles published by Elsevier (ScienceDirect), ASME, AIAA, Springer, John Wiley, OUP, CUP, AMS, World Scientific, few Annual Series, etc. Created by ICAST an e-journals gateway with browse and search (alphabetical and subject wise) facility for titles provides access to more than 700 journals available free on the net. The Centre provides a number of web/e-mail based innovative information services including Journal Contents Service, News Clipping Service, Monthly Documents Additions Lists covering both Books and Technical Reports, Web Alert Service and Union Catalogue of Journals -CSIR and Aerospace Libraries, etc. 13

A Multipurpose Indian Gateway for Aerospace Information

Aerospace Science and Technology encompasses the work carried in good number of branches of Engineering, Physical, Chemical, Material and other sciences. Electronic publishing is order of the day and aerospace Samp;T falls in line. This paper identifies various types of aerospace information generated in a variety of media and different access mechanisms. Few aerospace virtual libraries and library sites attached to aerospace institutions world over provide links to relevant sources. However Indian National Aerospace Laboratoriesx2019; portal x2018;AeroInfox2019; (www.aeroinfo.org.in) designed, developed and maintained by its Information Center (ICAST) is unique Aerospace Information Gateway in many respects. More than 50,000 web sources have been indexed under various headings including General Categories like- associations, organizations, space agencies, education, research and museums; Interdependent Subjects like- physics, chemistry, materials, mechanical engineering, electronics and composites; NASA Subject Categories like- aeronautics, aerodynamics, avionics, wind tunnels, composites, materials, etc; and Aviation Categories like- aircraft, airlines, air shows, airports, helicopters, etc. Indian Aerospace sources are covered exhaustively and are indexed separately using many subject headings and further grouped under four main categories- Aviation, Space Samp;T, Associations / Organisations and General. Links have been given to different servers for searching and downloading different types of aerospace documents like technical reports, journals, patents, regulatory information, conferences and news. ICAST also creates its own digital content including news clippings in aerospace, table of contents of 280 journals it subscribes, OPAC of library with gt;3,00,000 records, union catalogue of journals subscribed in 40 CSIR and 25 aerospace libraries, proceedings of conference on Knowledge Management and full text of NAL technical reports. Based on these resources a number of value added web/e-mail based information services are provided for the benefit of aerospace community within and outside NAL. The portal has been evaluated and indexed by many search engines and aerospace portals maintained by world aerospace leaders

Open source software based information services at CSIR-NAL

R&D library and information centers play important role in fulfilling information needs of its scientists and technologists. With the advent of ICT, roles and services of Information centers and information seeking behaviors among its patrons shifted dramatically towards e- environment. Cost of the software tools available to implement web based information services is not affordable for libraries and information centers in developing countries. Best possible solution for this problem will be adopting open source based software tools in libraries. This paper highlights various electronic information services implemented using open source software at CSIR-NAL

IR@NAL: Journey in green road OA publishing

The Institutional Repository at NAL is the digital archive of the research output of the scientists and technologists. The Repository was established with objectives of increasing visibility for intellectual output of an organization and long term preservation with well established policies. GNU Eprints open source IR tool is used for archiving and managing the digital collection. This paper in detail explains the inception and the saga of six year journey of NAL-IR in green road OA publishing channel. The paper discusses the technology employed, methodology adopted for data collection and preservation, customization of NAL-IR. The process of user education regarding OA publishing with respect to green road is discussed in detail with statistics. It is summarized by providing the current status and the statistics on number of hits received