INDEST Consortium: Extended

Transcription

1 INDEST Consortium: Extended Tamal Kumar Guha Assistant Librarian IIT Guwahati by Jagdish Arora National Coordinator, INDEST Consortium Librarian, IIT Delhi Abstract The article briefs about the activities of the INDEST Consortium, future plans of it and its structural/functional model. The concept of INDEST Extended has been highlighted with emphasis to creation of full-text ETDs database and UNION OPAC. Keywords: INDEST Consortium, Extended INDEST, Library Consortium, Electronic Resource Sharing. 1. INTRODUCTION For many centuries academic libraries were able to collect, organize, preserve materials and serve the users, independently. However, as literature and user demands grew, libraries sought efficiencies through cooperation. The beginning of the co-operative movement was first reported in 1880s, when Library Journal published articles on library cooperation, which suggested that libraries work together to share their collections. Interest in library cooperation remained high thereafter (Bostick, 2001). The creation of union catalogues of the participating member libraries and copy cataloging were among the first co-operative ventures in libraries, followed by physical resources sharing of books and periodicals through interlibrary loans and joint archiving. The traditional barriers to access the information resources are progressively diminishing, thanks to the seemingly ubiquitous nature of the Internet and information technologies, which made it possible for the academic community to retrieve information through cyberspace with greater speed and economy. The emergence of Internet, particularly, the World Wide Web (WWW) as a new medium of information delivery triggered proliferation of Web-based full-text online resources. Increasing number of publishers is using the Internet as a global way to offer their publications to the international academic community (Arora and Agarwal, 2003). Captivating the advantages of new innovation, the relatively recent establishment of academic library consortia focusing on the identification, acquisition, and management of electronic resources reflects the continuing evolution of co-operation among libraries. An equally paradigmatic change appears to have taken place in the world of shared electronic information acquisition and provision. Electronic consortia have been budding forth in every part of the world in bewildering forms and shapes. However, the genesis, evolution, and growth of library consortia are not just for the sake of itself. The underneath raison d'être of all these activities is the sheer advantage of it. The historic quest for the great comprehensive collection has been superseded by the need to provide access to collective scholarly resources that no one library can afford (Harloe and Budd, 1994). Although, circumferentially and essentially the financial benefit is the dominant factor for consortia effort, it however, has multidimensional beneficial perspective. The buying power, PLANNER: Automation of Libraries in North Eastern Region: trends, issues and challenges

2 risk-sharing capacity, collaborative technical expertise, and unified lobbying potential exponentially enhances when a group of institutions or libraries venture through a consortium. The consortium acting as an agent on behalf of all member libraries to negotiate a purchase price that is lower than that available to an individual institution achieves the reduction of cost. In addition to reduction of the immediate purchasing price, the consortia also aim at lobbying information providers as a group, to reduce the rate at which the cost of information is rising as well as reduce the unit cost of information. The greater the concentrated purchasing power of the consortia, the greater the window of opportunity to influence pricing models for electronic information (Hiremath, 2001). As an example, it can be mentioned that the rates offered to the INDEST Consortium for the full-text resources and databases for various categories of institutions in the consortium would have costing Rs. 164 crores as per their list price, while through the consortium, the total cost comes to Rs crores for all institutions being considered under the consortium, a total overall saving of Rs crores. It has been also estimated that the participating institutes saved a total amount of Rs.965 lakhs on resources as because of the facilities made available by the Consortium. Recent days consortia, however, have espoused and incorporated the traditional concept of document delivery service and union catalogue modulated through web-based technologies. Integrated approach to joint acquisition of information, electronic documents delivery and UNIONOPAC of the members is a regular pattern of the present day library consortia. In India, ventures in this direction are also underway and INDEST Consortium is one of them. The rest part of this paper will highlight the brief activities of the INDEST Consortium; future plans of it ( INDEST Extended ) and its structural/functional model. 2. INDEST CONSORTIUM: A BRIEF OVERVIEW Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India, for the first time, as a Government initiative, firmed up the concept of Consortia-based Subscription to Electronic Resources for Technical Education System in India on the recommendations made by an Expert Group, appointed by the Ministry for the purpose. This consortium has been named as the Indian National Digital Library in Science and Technology (INDEST) Consortium and is headquartered at IIT Delhi. 2.1 The structure of the Consortium The consortium headquarters functions under a National Steering Committee with the responsibilities of ensuring inter-institutional co-ordination; monitoring licenses for electronic resources, ordering and payment for subscribed services, establishing Work Groups on different subjects to improve the functioning of consortium as well as to identify new resources and evaluate the existing resources; and propagating the consortium to attract new members in it. The Ministry has also set-up a National Review Committee that have the overall responsibility of making policies, monitoring the progress, coordinating with UGC and AICTE for promoting the activities of INDEST Consortium. The important functions of the consortium headquarters are: to act as nodal agency for increasing the cooperation amongst participating institutions; to coordinate all activities concerned with subscription of e-resources on behalf of consortium; to liaison with electronic publishers to provide training and technical help to participating member institutions; to coordinate with MHRD and participating institutions for subscription to resources; to organize the meeting of the National Steering Committee and to decide upon the policy issues; to maintain a Web site for the PLANNER: Automation of Libraries in North Eastern Region: trends, issues and challenges 2

3 Consortium for the benefit of its members and to encourage sharing of resources in an online mode; to propagate the consortium with other institutions and enrol new members in the consortium; to organize annual meetings of the consortium members. MHRD has provided necessary financial supports for the consortium-based subscription to the electronic resources (full text as well as databases) for 38 beneficiary institutions including the IITs, IIMs, IISc, NITs, and other INDEST Consortium Members. Besides that, 60 Government or Government-aided engineering colleges and technical departments in universities have joined the Consortium with financial support from the AICTE. At the time of preparation of this paper, total 15 other Engineering Colleges and Institutions have also joined the Consortium on payment basis. 2.2 Members of Core Group and their Categories Categorization of institutions recommended by the Task Force on Human Resource Development in Information Technology was followed to provide differential access to electronic resources to various institutions depending on their education and research activities. The following table shows the categories and the member strength under each category. Table-1: Categories and the member strength of the INDEST Consortium Core Member Category No. of members IITs and IISc I 08 NITs, ISM, SLIET and NERIST II 20 IIITs and PEC Chandigarh III 02 IIMs, NITIE and IIITM SIG 08 Total 38 AICTE Supported Institutions Other Engineering Colleges and Institutions Self supported 16 Grand Total: 114 The category of institutions are basically used to denote the level of usage of electronic resources, conceived to be highest amongst institutions in Category I, modest for institutions in Category II and lowest amongst the institutions under category III. As such, all IITs and IISc (eight institutions) are considered as Category I institutions, NITs (17 institutions), ISM Dhanbad, SLIET and NERIST fall under category II institutions, and IIIT (Alahabad), and PEC Chandigarh are considered category III institutions. IIMs are considered as a Special Interest Group (SIG: Management Schools). NITIE and IIITM (Gwalior) are also included with IIMs for electronic resources to be provided to the IIMs. 2.3 Resources Subscribed by the Consortium The consortium negotiated with the publishers for subscription to the electronic resources mentioned below. The expert group appointed by the Ministry recommended providing differential access to electronic resources based on their usability and suitability to various beneficiary institutions. The electronic resources subscribed by the Consortium are: PLANNER: Automation of Libraries in North Eastern Region: trends, issues and challenges 3

4 Table-2: The electronic resources subscribed by the Consortium Sl. No. Full-text Resources Sl. No. Bibliographic Resources 1 IEL Online 1 COMPENDEX 2 Elsevier s ScienceDirect 2 INSPEC 3 Academic's Ideal Library 3 SciFinder Scholar 4 Springer Verlag s: Link 4 MathSciNet 5 ProQuest s Applied Science & Technology Plus 5 Web of Science 6 ABI / INFORM Complete 6 J-Gate Custom Content for Consortia (JCCC) 7 ACM Digital Library 7 J-Gate 8 ASCE Journals 8 JGATE for Engineering & Technology (JET) 9 ASME Journals 10 Asian CERC's Insight 11 CRIS INFAC Industry Information Service At the time of preparation of this paper the INDEST Consortium has subscribed to 11 full-text and eight bibliographic resources. However, as described above, the distribution of these resources is not uniform amongst the member institutes. The Institution-wise distribution of these resources has been plotted in the Appendix. 2.4 An Open-ended Proposition The consortium, being an open-ended system, welcomes other institutions that would like to join and get the benefit of not only highly discounted subscription rates but also the favourable terms of licenses. The consortium offers the best possible price advantage ranging from 25% to 95% (Average > 80% +) through its pricing agreements with publishers as well as terms of agreement for various electronic resources. Moreover, the consortium would also provide technical help and arrange for in-house training for optimal usage of resources subscribed. Membership of the consortium is open to any Private or Government-funded Engineering / Technological / Educational institutions / Universities for one or more electronic resources. The new members would be required to sign an agreement with the INDEST Consortium as well as with the publishers of electronic resources that they wish to subscribe. The consortium would charge nominal annual fee. Although institutions can join the consortium at any level of category depending upon their usage profile, the maximum benefits are available to the institutions in category III. 2.5 Present member Institutes from North East India At present, following 5 Institutes, from North-East India, are the members of the INDEST Consortium. Different set of full-text and bibliographic are available to these institutes depending on the categories they belong to. It is expected more number of colleges, universities and other educational as well as research institutes will join this venture to draw the optimum benefits, by paying substantially low subscription amount. Table-3: Member Institutes from NE India Sl.No. Institutes from NE India Category 1 Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Category I 2 National Institute of Technology, Silchar Category II PLANNER: Automation of Libraries in North Eastern Region: trends, issues and challenges 4

5 3 NERIST, Arunachal Pradesh Category II 4 Assam Engineering College, Guwahati, Assam AICTE supported Institute 5 Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam AICTE supported Institute 3. ON-GOING AND FUTURE ACTIVITIES As part of consortium activities INDEST has taken up certain activities, like JCCC@INDEST, creation of full-text ETDs database, UNIONOPAC of the participating member institutes. JCCC@INDEST is already in the implementation process and rest are in different phases of planning. In addition to that the Consortium has taken initiative to enhance the resource-base as well as monitoring and benchmarking the usages of the resources. The following are the brief highlights of these activities. 3.1 JCCC@INDEST The Consortium has given highest priority to sharing of resources amongst member institutions through an interface called JGate Custom Contents for Consortia (JCCC). The JCCC is a virtual library of journal literature created as customized e-journals access gateway and database solution for the INDEST consortium. It acts as one-point access to 4,000+ subscribed currently by all the IITs and IISc and available online. The JCCC is currently installed in IISc Bangalore and available at As the service is IP authenticated, its use is currently limited to IISc researchers only. In addition to that JCCC is also available at The service has certain unique features. When a user finds an article of her/his interest, s/he can get it online if the INDEST Consortium has online rights of access to the corresponding journal. Say for example, if the journal is not subscribed by user s library and is subscribe by another library, an automated photocopy request goes to the library where the journal is available which is designated for supplying the article to the user. Thus the users of all member institutions of the Consortium can share the journal articles amongst themselves. A brief statistical glimpse of the JCCC@INDEST is given in the Table-4. Table-4: A brief statistical glimpse of the JCCC@INDEST (as of 22 nd July, 2003) Sl.No. Coverage Number 1 Publishers Journals 3,789 3 Issues 39,783 4 Articles 6,93,145 5 Abstracts 5,44,069 6 Free Journals Years covered INDEST Extended In the INDEST Consortium User Group Meeting at the MHRD on 11 th June, 2003, the National Coordinator suggested that the consortium may take up the additional activities, like, setting-up Interoperable Electronic Submission of Theses and Dissertations; web-based Union Catalogue of member library resources; etc. It was also suggested that the new initiatives might be taken up under a new MHRD program that may be named as INDEST Extended National Thesis Database Based on INDEST Extended concept, it has been planned to create a National Digital Theses Archive comprising of full-text digital image database of the Masters and Doctoral theses in the area of sciences and engineering coming from premier academic institutions in India starting with PLANNER: Automation of Libraries in North Eastern Region: trends, issues and challenges 5

6 IITs and IISc. The scanned images will be run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for extracting texts. This will also be used for making the documents searchable across the entire text. The accesses will be controlled by authenticated IP ranges Union Online Public Access Catalogue (Union OPAC) Furthering the INDEST Extended concept it has also been planned that to share resources amongst the member institutions through Union OPAC. The Consortium will have a common books catalogue and ideally it should be live links to OPAC database of various libraries. So, if one is looking for a book, the OPAC will identify all the libraries where the book is available and whether the book is issued out or on shelf. This can then lead to inter-library loan of book between INDEST members. In this regard, LibSys Corporation, New Delhi came up with a proposal to create a Union OPAC for INDEST on a trial basis. In the trial phase it has been planned that the database of all IITs and IISc will be merged in a central server, which in itself may not hold any data, but will be running applets to connect all the Z39.50 compliant databases to query and return answers. 3.2 Increasing the resource-base The Consortium is under active consideration of increasing their resource-base for different categories of members from the year The resources under consideration are: 1. Nature 2. Science 3. EBSCO Business Source Premier 4. Emerald Full-text 5. Blackwell Publisher (300 journals) 6. Kluwer Online (journals on humanities and social sciences) 7. Taylor and Francis (all journals) 8. John Wiley (selected journals on cross sharing basis) 9. Euromonitor (GMID) 10. Capitaline 11. JCCC for SIG-MS 12. NEXIS.Com Corporate Info (only for SIG-MS) 13. Science Direct (for SIG-MS, also) 3.3 Usage monitoring Understandably no resource can be subscribed if the usage of the same is not substantial. Hence the Consortium has made provision to access the usage statistics through Web-based interfaces from the publisher s site or through . Benchmarking of publication productivity of institutions also found to be an essential criterion to assess the actual level usages of the resources. In addition to number of publications appear in Science Citation Index, other criteria, like, patents, research projects, research reports, honours and awards, etc. may also be used to make assessments. Works in this direction is in progress. These measures will help the Consortium to a get a suitable feedback which in turn will help to re-shape the subscription-base in the future years. To improve the usages of the resources and better facilitating the services the Consortium has emphasized on the training of the users of the member institutes and their staff members involved in the process. Therefore, it has been decided that each institution beneficiary of resources from the INDEST Consortium shall organize a Users Convention in their respective institutions for the benefit of their user community. It has also been decided that All IITs / IISc would conduct three- PLANNER: Automation of Libraries in North Eastern Region: trends, issues and challenges 6

7 day training programmes for the Library Staff members of various categories of institutions within next one year for which the Consortium will provide a grant of Rs. 50, In addition, IIT Roorkee will conduct a three-day training programme for NITs, NERIST, ISM and SLIET. 4. CONCLUSIONS Once the Consortium takes its own shape, after incorporating the Extended INDEST initiatives, the entire structure would look like a model gives below in Fig-1. The structure and operational model the Consortium is at the centre of the model, the inputs are made by the INDEST by means of full-text e-journals, e-bibliographic resources, e-archive of the subscribed resources and e-books (incorporation of e-book in the resource-base is a suggestion of these authors), then the individual libraries will do the in-house jobs like web linking, document delivery within the Consortium, corroborate their OPACs, create their own ETDs full-text database, and maintain the e-archives (mirror-sites) of the subscribed resources, as a part of their activities and output job. Then the total assessment will be made based on the usages of the resources and the productivity of the researches publications of the individual institutes. With all these added features, INDEST Consortium (being an open-ended initiative) invites other institutions to join it for the benefits it offers. Reference: Arora, J. & Agrawal, P. (2003). Indian Digital Library in Engineering Science and Technology (INDEST) Consortium: Consortia-Based Subscription to Electronic Resources for Technical Education System in India: A Government of India Initiative. In T.A.V. Murthy (Ed.), Mapping Technology on Libraries and People. CALIBER-2003: Proceedings of the First International Convention on Mapping Technology on Libraries and People. 10th CALIBER, February 2003, Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad: Information and Library Network Bostick, S. L. (2001). The History and Development of Academic Library Consortia in the PLANNER: Automation of Libraries in North Eastern Region: trends, issues and challenges 7

8 United States: An Overview. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 27(2), Harloe, B. & Budd, J. (1994). Collection development and scholarly communication in the era of electronic access. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 20(2), Hiremath, U. (2001). Electronic resource: sharing in the consortia digital age. Collection Building, 20(2), In addition to above resources, the authors of this article have collected substantial amount of information from several official communiqués issued by the INDEST headquarters; Ministry of Human Resource Development, Govt. of India; s of the INDEST mail group and the INDEST website [ The authors convey their heartfelt thanks to Mr. Pawan Agarwal, Director, Department of Secondary & Higher Education, Technical Section I, Ministry of Human Resource Development, for his encouraging gesture to publish articles on the Consortium. PLANNER: Automation of Libraries in North Eastern Region: trends, issues and challenges 8