National Information Centre on Management (NICMAN)

The country's first information centre on Management Science, namely, NICMAN, under NISSAT programme would become operational soon. The centre is being developed around the nucleus of Vikram Sarabhai Library (VSL) of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA). The database being developed covers global databases on management science, applications on management concepts, business information, applied management research, etc.

IIMA is one of the primary institutions in the country with a mission of professionalising Indian management through teaching, training and research.

Vikram Sarabhai Library

VSL has over 1,30,000 books and about 35,000 back volumes of journals. It subscribes to 600 Indian and foreign periodicals. The Institute has a LAN and VSL is a node on the LAN. LAN facility is used to provide value-added services to the faculty such as circulation information, weekly receipts of journals, research and publication bibliography of the institute and World Bank Publication Index.

Need Assessment Study

A comprehensive nation-wide study was conducted for need assessment, through questionnaire, among academic, business and industry and services sector segments. The findings have underlined

— Criticality of information for decision making

— Inadqeuacy of currently available information

— Non-availability of critical information on time

— Uniformly high intention to use products / services such as annotated bibliographies, abstracts, executive summaries, statistical databases on different kinds of environments in machine readable form, online and hard copy.

Mission

A professionally managed centre to provide timely management and business information for improving decision making by managers in India and for supporting applied management research that leads to improved management practices.

Objectives

1. Serve the information needs of management students, teachers researchers and managers.

2. Prepare value-added information products and services and cases.

3. Strengthen the resouce base, and provide organizations access to international databases for management information.

4. Collect, process and disseminate information on various sectors of the economy and conduct industry and sector studies.

5. Establish a network of management and other allied libraries to strengthen the resource base.

6. Use appropriate information technology for internal management, networking and marketing.

7. Develop and conduct training/teaching programs for professionals of library/ information centres in organizing, designing and developing, and marketing of information products and services.

Functions

1. Conduct research for assessing user needs, developing appropriate products and services and marketing strategies

2. Conduct information technology assessment and develop innovative applications for storage, retrieval and dissemination

3. Develop and conduct training for internal as well as external library and information professionals for improving decision making and marketing skills

4. Analyze information and prepare reports and industry studies

5. Provide library facilities

6. Provide documentation and information services including computerized information retrieval

7. Provide database search service

8. Develop close cooperation among libraries/information centres for exchange of information and resource sharing

9. Provide reprographic services

Services

It is proposed to expand the range of services and attempt value addition for serving the external clients both academic and business and industry. The programme would be implemented in Phases.

In the first phase the following services are proposed :

1. Extend indexing and current awareness services to external clients (both academic and business and industry)

2. Start abstracting service from our own database as well as CD-ROM based databases and extend to external clients

3. Extend database search service using our own database and CD-ROMs to external clients

4. Extend access to external clients for case bibliography and develop electronic delivery system i.e. through E-mail or floppy diskettes

5. Undertake design of selected industry profiles, country profiles, and management digest/executive summaries.

In the second phase, it is proposed to offer the following additional services.

• Industry / Country information service

• Management Digest / Executive summeries

• Develop a system for online delivery wherever possible

The third phase is likely to achieve delivery of above services through all the three delivery systems i.e. hard copy, floppy and online.

From the second phase onwards the center would assess market requirements and develop new products/ services.

Organization of the Centre

1. Library and Documentation Division

   1.1    Library Unit
   1.2    Documentation & Information Unit
   1.3    Computerized Information Retrieval Unit

2. Research Division

   2.1    Industry database & Research unit
   2.2    Teaching & Training Material Unit

3. Marketing & Training Division

   3.1    Marketing Unit
   3.2    Training Unit

4. Services Division

Networking & Resource Sharing

The centre would share resources with VSL of IIMA for base materials. In addition, the centre would make efforts to create a network of management institutions' libraries particularly the IIMs and other national level institutions, to promote effective use of resources by academic as well as business and industry segments.

Training

With the expertise, skills and experience available at the IIMA, the centre would also focus on training programs to reorient the library and information professionals to adopt and implement marketing programs for their library/information centre. This would include organizing, designing and developing, and marketing of information products and services.