Enhancing CDROM Search Results with IISc

Library’s Journals Holding Data

(Access Presentation)

Project Report
submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the

Training programme in Information Technology Applications

to Library and Information Services

By

T.S. PRASANNA

NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENCE INFORMATION

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE
BANGALORE 560 012.

APRIL 2001
 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the project work “PROGRAM

TO POST-PROCESS THE CDROM DATABASE RECORDS

TO INDICATE THE JOURNAL AVAILABILITY IN J R D

TATA MEMORIAL LIBRARY” is a bonafide record of work

done by Mr. T.S. Prasanna under my guidance in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the training

programme in Information Technology Applications to

Library and Information Services.

Ms K Thulasi

Scientific Staff, National Centre for Science Information,

Indian Institute Of Science

 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that this project report on, “Program to Post-Process the
CDROM databases records to indicate the journal availability in J R D Tata
Memorial Library, Indian Institute of Science”, which is being submitted in partial
fulfillment of the Tr a i n i n g P r o g r a m m e i n I n f o r m a t i o n T e c h n o l o g y
A p p l i c a t i o n s t o L i b r a r y a n d I n f o r m a t i o n S e r v i c e s , is the result of
the work carried out by me, under the guidance of Ms K Thulasi, Scientific Staff of
National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science.

I further submit that this project work has not been submitted to the NCSI before
or for any other purpose.

(T.S. Prasanna)
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I take immense pleasure in thanking Prof. A G Menon, Chairman, and

Dr. T B Rajasekar, our beloved Associate Chairman for having permitted me to

carry out this project work.

I wish to express my deep sense of gratitude to my Internal Guide, Ms. K Thulasi,

Scientific Staff, National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of
Science for her able guidance and useful suggestions, which helped me in completing the
project work, in time.

Needless to mention that Mr.Filber Minj, Scientific Officer, who had been a source
of inspiration and for his timely guidance in the conduct of our project work. I would also
like to thank Mr. Manu Rajan, Ms. K T Anuradha and Mr Francis Jayakanth of National
Centre for Science Information for all their valuable assistance in the project work.

Words are inadequate in offering my thanks to the Project Trainees and Project
Assisatants, NCSI for their encouragement and cooperation in carrying out the project
work.

Finally, yet importantly, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my beloved

parents for their blessings, my friends/classmates for their help and wishes for the
successful completion of this project.

T.S. Prasanna
 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 INTRODUCTION

If knowledge implies power, then its basic ingradient- information is

a vital source of power. Scientific and technical information plays an
important role in the development of nations. The proliferation of
research and development programmes has resulted in an enormous
output of the scientific proceedings, etc that is growing exponentially.
Added to this, there is a growing user population, making greater
demands for information and increasing cost of materials and services.

Challenge and Response:

In the above context, information handling and transfer have

become extremely complex. The conventional techniques of bibliographic
control have been put to severe strain in recent years, to cope up with this
complex problem. Efforts to meet the challenge caused by the
information explosion and to make the available relevant information to
the user in time and in an economic manner have led to the evolutions of
newer techniques in processing and storing of information for quick and
efficient retrieval.

Information services:

Information service has been defined as a service provided by, or

for, any Information centre which draw attention to information
possessed in its centre in anticipation of demand; this is done by
preparing and circulating newsheets, literature surveys, reading
lists, abstracts, particulars of articles in current periodicals, etc
which it is anticipated will be of potential interests of the users of
the service.

The factors that mainly diminish the usefulness of the general

information services to the users of a library are the time lag and
scattered information. In view of this, libraries scan through the reading
materials received by them and issue their own local documentation lists
to meet the need of their clientele. These are in the form of a) Simple
Documentation lists b) Abstracts c) Indexing documentation lists d)
Document Delivery Services. Other types of services will include
document procurement, either by purchase or by Inter Library Loan and
translation and reprographic service.

So, to meet the needs of user community it has become important

function of the any library to do the document delivery service (DDS).

1.2 NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENCE INFORMATION

NCSI is a UGC Inter-University Centre for Science Information,

functioning as a constituent of the Indian Institute of Science. It has
been the mandate to act as a national level information facility for
researchers in Indian Universities and colleges in the areas of
Science and Engineering. The centre was started in 1983, under the
chairmanship of Prof. V Rajaraman and has today developed into a
premier information centre, providing a variety of computer-based
information services.
Catalyst for Quality research:
Information services provided by the Centre was designed to
reduce the time for gathering information and assimilation of
information by the scientists and also aid immensely in directing
their
efforts towards quality research.
Resource Base:
NCSI has adapted information technology for harnessing S & T
information. Our technology base includes networked PCs and
workstations, CD-ROM workstations, a 28 CDROM server, Internet
and online database connectivity, Web and E-mail servers, scanning
and CD recording facilities.
The information services provided by the centre are derived
from its electronic library of key international level bibliographic, full
text and factual databases on CDROM covering major areas of
Science and Engineering.

Information Services:
Major function of NCSI is to help researchers in gaining access
to results of research work conducted world wide, related to his/her
field of specialization. Towards this end, the centre has developed a
variety of information services.
Database search services:
Under database search services, the centre provides both
current and retrospective information services. Current information
services provide latest information in specific areas of science and
technology. These are profile based and operate on yearly
subscription . Current Awareness Service(CAS) and Contents Of
Periodicals in Science and Technology(COPSAT) are two key services
under this category. Retrospective services support on-demand,
comprehensive database searches for specific period. CD-ROM
search service(CDRS), Online Search Service (OSS) and Factual Data
Search Service (FDSS) are three retrospective information services
provided by NCSI.
Document Delivery Service:
Database search services of the Centre have succeeded in
creating more demand for full text of research papers, while the
document supply facilities within the country have worsened due to
drastic cuts in subscription of periodicals by libraries. The DDS of
the centre helps the researchers with the daunting task of finding
full text papers. NCSI has international tie-ups with BLDSC, K., NLA,
Australia and KR Sourceone, USA to supplement the IISc library
collection.
Network Information Services:
A networked environment offers an unique opportunity of
serving research information to the end users right at his/her
desktop computer. NCSI has taken cognizance of the emerging
national and global network infrastructure and integrate its
information services into the overall networked environment.
Network Information services of the centre include: E-mail based
services, Internet Search Services(ISS), Infowatch, LIS-Forum. The
excellent campus intranet existing in IISc is used by NCSI to offer
network access to its CD-ROM databases. Recently, the centre
introduced three existing profile-based services, delivered to
individual through E-Mail. Electronic Table of Contents(ETOC)
delivers content pages of journals selected by the researcher every
week. Citation Alert Services delivers citing paper and source paper
data to individual faculty, pertaining to their research publications.
Hot Papers in Science(HPIS) delivers highly cited research
publications during the recent most two-year period, to the faculty
based on the topics identified by them.
Projects:
The centre has been able to attract a modest number of
consultancies and sponsored R & D Projects thanks to the enterprise
and infrastructure facilities developed over the years. These
projects have helped in further sharpening of their technical
competence and to develop new techniques, tools and innovative
products and solutions. The Centre’s staff have also been called
upon to serve on various national level committees set up by
agencies like the UGC, MHRD, planning Commission dealing with the
formulation of plans and policies, curriculum development, etc in
the area of information science and technology.

1.3 J R D TATA MEMORIAL LIBRARY

The Library of the Indian Institute of Science(IISc) Bangalore,

was established in 1911 and it is one of the first three departments
started in the Institute. It is regarded as one of the best scientific
and technical libraries in India. Apart from the main library it has
departmental libraries also. In 1995 the library was renamed as “ J
R D Tata Memorial Library”.
The primary mission of the library is to support the
educational and research programmes by providing physical and
intellectual access to information, consistent with the present and
the anticipated educational and research functions of the institute.
The secondary mission is to serve as a resource centre for the
scholars and scientific community of the country. The collection of
the library includes books, journals, reports, standards and patents
is regarded as the one of the richest collections in the country. The
annual budget of the library is about 6.5 crores of which
subscription receives over 1557 periodical titles of which 1229 are
subscribed while the remaining titles are as gratis and on exchange
basis. The total holdings of the library exceeds 4,11,676
documents.
The library offers services such as Reference Services,
Referral services, User Guidance services, Circulation service
including Inter Library Loan and Document Delivery Service, Book
Bank Service, weekly display of Xerox copies of articles and books
including Email distribution of these lists to users on the mailing list,
Bibliographics service, Xerox service, etc. The library has been
using the LIBSYS an Integrated Library Management software
package will all the modules for the library housekeeping
operations. Further, the bibliographic information of books are also
accessible through web (Co-operative effort of Library and NCSI).
The library is participating in the Networking and resource
sharing activity in the city libraries through Bangalore Library
Network(BALNET) and maintains a union catalogue of all periodical
publications received in the city and union catalogue of books and
four major libraries in the city.
Document Delivery Service at IISc Library:
 The library offer DDS ( material if it is with them) to the
students and researchers from other research centres and
universities on special request. This service offered on cost basis
without violating the copyright law.

1.4 DOCUMENT DELIVERY SERVICE (DDS)

Post-processing of online search results is a fact of life. A
searcher will routinely open a captured search session file in a word
processing application and edit it by removing false drops or
duplicates, and deleting search statements, login and logout
displays, cost information, headers and banners—in essence
removing anything deemed irrelevant or unnecessary to the client.
According to "Harrod's - Librarians Glossary and Reference Book",
"Document Delivery Services" - hosts enable users to order copies
of materials retrieved by online searches, either by direct despatch
of items by the host, or via an agent. Such document delivery
services may also be offered online to the users' terminals, rather
than in
hard copy.
"Host" - a host makes available , on a commission or rental basis,
access to any number of databases via his own computer.
In general document delivery is simple. A citation is received by
a document delivery service—in which some cases is a citation
fragment, incomplete and requiring immediate verification. More
commonly the citation appears complete, and the best source of the
document is then located by the search specialist, who either gives
the cite to the person to retrieve and photocopy or directs the user
to appropriate source.
The terms “document delivery” and “online searching” are
imprecise and becoming anachronistic. Still they broadly denotes
two kinds of information retrieval that in practice overlaps
sometimes. The searching between searching and document
delivery – though constantly evolving is real and receives less
attention than it should.
When online search results are provided to a patron or client in
response to a request for information, it is naturally assumed that
any bibliographic citations contained therein- as long as they are
accurate—can be subsequently used to request physical copies of
the documents they cite. If the client decides to tract down citation,
the request is channeled into a document delivery or ILL workflow –
either going back to the online searcher or directly to the library or
commercial document provider.
Document Delivery Services are critical to libraries and are
concerned with the capability of a library to provide users with the
items they need when need arises. Capability measures and
satisfaction measures of library effectiveness are some of the
measures gaining increasing acceptable in evaluating a library.
Capability measures the services as well as the collection of the
library
While the satisfaction measures tends to address delivery of
services to fulfill the expressed demand. The capabilities of the
library depend largely as facility services, adjunct services and
these influences the positive change in the DDS including increase
in satisfaction level of users or book availability factor if libraries
adopt the state of art Information Technology.
 1.5 OVERVIEW OF DATABASES AT NCSI

1. CABCD:
CABCD is published by CAB International, UK is an
Intergovernmental organization registered with UN. It is a
Agricultural bibliographical database available from 1973 and it is
available in NCSI from 1996. CD-ROM publisher of this database is
SilverPlatter, USA. It covers majority of agriculture, agronomy,
biotechnology, dairy science, forestry, genetics, microbiology
nutrition, parsitology and much more. Document types include
journals, monographs, conferences, books, annual reports and other
sources. It covers about 11,000 journals and an average of
1,60,000 new records per year. It provides free text index of all
fields.

2. BIOSIS:
BIOSIS is also a bibliographical records of biological science
published by Biological Abstracts Inc, USA. It includes primary
journals of about 9000 and about 3,60,000 journals are covered in
this database. It is published in 1926 and is available in NCSI form
1991 and it is published in CDROM by Silver Platter, USA. It covers
Aerospace biology, Agriculture, anatomy, biophysics, botany, cell
biology, zoology, clinical medicine, toxicology, and much more. It
provides basic index of all fields and search software is SPIRS.
3. MEDLINE:
MEDLINE is a bibliographic records with abstracts of biomedicine
subject published by U S National Library of Medicine(NLM). It’s a
combination of three print versions Index Medicus, Index to Dental
Literature, International Nursing Index. It is being published from
1966 and it is available in NCSI from 1966 onwards. This database
covers microbiology, nutrition, pharmacology, environmental health,
chemicals and drugs of document types directories, addresses,
congresses, journals, reviews, etc. It covers about 4300 journals of
about 4,00,000 records per year. Thesaurus is based on MeSH
(Medical Subject Headings). SPIRS is the search software.

4. CA on CD:
Chemical Abstracts on CD is a bibliographic database in Chemical
Sciences produced by American Chemical Society,USA. It is being
published from 1907 and is available in NCSI from 1987. Its print
version is Chemical Abstracts. It covers Biochemistry, organic-
physical and inorganic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, biology and
chemical engineering. Document types covered are scientific and
technical literatures, patents, government reports, dissertation and
books. It covers about 8000 scientific journals of 650,000
documents and 150,000 patents. It provides Author, General
Subject Index, Patent, Chemical Substance, keyword Index.

5. Ei COMPENDEX:

Compendex is an engineering database equivalent to print

version
Engineering Index and Conference records from Engineering
Meeting file. It is published from 1970 and is available in NCSI from
1987. Engineering Information Inc,USA is publishing it and CDROM
publisher is Dialog, SilverPlatter. It covers Electrical Engineering,
Computers and control, Mechanical chemical materials,
Civil/Structural, Engineering Management and Applied Physics. It
covers about 5000 international journals, conference proceedings,
technical reports. Number of records are around 220,000. In
includes author, word and phrase, classification heading, conference
search options,etc. Search software is Ondisc.

6. MathSci:
MathSci database is an electronic version of Mathematical
Reviews
and Current Mathematical Publications, being published from 1940.
It is available in NCSI from 1980. American Mathematical Society,
USA is the producer of this database. Silverplatter is the CDROM
publisher. It covers mathematics, statistics and mathematically
related research in statistics, computer science, physics, biology
and other disciplines. It covers 1799 journals and collection of
67,000 records. Mathematical Subject Classification is the
Thesaurus available. SPIRS is the search software for MathSci
database.

7. INSPEC Ondisc :
Inspec Ondisc is a bibliographic database of Science Abstracts in
Physics. It is first published in 1969 and is available in NCSI from
1989. It is published quarterly by the Institution of Electrical
Engineers, UK. The document types of journals and conference
proceedings from atomic and molecular physics, thermodynamics,
Magnetism, Nuclear physics, acoustics, semiconductors, astronomy,
astrophysics, etc. It covers about 4000 scientific and technical
journals and 2000 conference publications. About 330,000 records
per year are published. This database can be searched by using
HEADFAST/Hunter Software.
 2. PROBLEM AND METHODOLOGY
2.1 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM :
Post processing cdrom outputs to check whether a journal is
avaialbel in the JRD Tata Memorial Library using C program.
This study aims to postprocess the CD-ROM outputs given to
the users in order to check whether the journals covered in their
outputs are available in the JRD Tata Memorial Library(IISc library)
for providing the Document Delivery Service, using C program. The
program is written such that input data is from journals covered
from 7 major CD-ROM databases and journals covered by the IISc
library.

2.2 NEED FOR THE STUDY :

For any Document Delivery Service it is necessary to check
whether the source the user wants is available in their library or
information centre. Therefore it was thought appropriate to do the
work on post processing the outputs to check the availability of
journals using C programming.
 Users availing the CDROM search service from NCSI, for
getting bibliographical information of articles covered in the
database is their area of interest. On going through the abstract
they get interested in the full text of article. To identify whether a
particular journal title covered in their outputs is available or not,
they need to consult library holdings list which is a time consuming
process, particularly when the number of records are more. To help
the user in reducing this difficulty, this project has been undertaken.
This will automatically show the availability details of a particular
journal for those record which are retrieved from the CDROM output.

6. REFERENCES
1. Radhakrishnan S and T K S Iyengar. Technical Information
Services for developing countries. ICSU/COSTED:
Bangalore,1997.
2. Kernighan, Brian W. and Dennis M Ritchie. The C Programming
Language. Printice Hall of India : New Delhi,1992.
3. http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in.
4. http://www.iisc.ernet.in.
5. http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/ncsi/database.html

MINOR PROJECT PRESENTATION