Sreedevi Ravindran

NISSAT, Department of Scientific & Industrial Research, New Delhi-110016

Introduction

Information administration and handling received the support of several computing packages in the last decade. CDS/ISIS is one such package developed by UNESCO as a part of its General Information Programme. The micro version of ISIS was released in 1985 as an interactive product. Since the time of release of the package, the distribution of the software and training on its use have been decentralized. A network of regional, national and special distributiors have been identified to promote the use of the package.

India was one of the first few countries in the Asian region to take advantage of the package. National Information System for Science & Technology (NISSAT) was identified by UNESCO as the national distributor in December 1985. The progress made since then are tremendous though a lot more needs to be done yet. These advances and developments are summarized in this paper.

Use of Improved Versions of the Package.

Nissat started experimenting with the CDS/ISIS ver 1.0 package for the development of indigenous capabilities in information handling. The focus was on the introduction of computers in information handling, development of small databases to gain experiences and training on the use of the package.

In 1989, an integrated version (2.0/2.3) with several improvements including interface with Pascal to perform numerical calculations became available. This version had taken into account the increase in storage and processing capacity of personal computers thus allowing the development of very large databases. Since India had already gained experience with the earlier version of the package, the availability of the improved version gave a filip to the growing movement of computer applications in library and information centres. The difficulties and problems experienced by the users were discussed in various forums including national user group meetings.

The use of CDS/ISIS to share large databases on local area networks became possible with the release of the version 3.0 in 1992.

Thereafter NISSAT had also taken up UNESCO developed IDAMS package for data analysis. Facilities are available for exporting data from CDS/ISIS to IDAMS for data analysis and vice versa.

Growth in the User Community

The number of licensed users of CDS/ISIS were 1389 by the end of October 1997. The increase in number of licensed users has not been uniform over the years. By the end of 1990, there were 406 users which increased to 960 by 1993, registering in annual rate of growth of about 33.2%. The change has, however, not been so impressive since then, and it took about four years to add another 429 users. The annual rate of growth has been only about 9.7% The position is summarized in Table 1.

One of the reasons for the low growth in CDS/ISIS users during the last four years is the introduction of a fee of Rs. 1500 to meet the cost of handling. The other could be that the market has reached the saturation.

Geographical Distribution of CDS/ISIS Users

The CDS/ISIS users in the country are mainly concentrated in North India with Delhi alone accounting for about 22% of the users. The second largest number of users are in the Southern states. In the Western region, Maharashtra alone accounted for 16.1% of the total users. The region wise distribution is given in Table 2.

Profile of User Institutions

The Micro-ISIS users belong to a variety of institutions involved in a wide spectrum of activities. The most common users (42.5%) are academic institutions, both Government and private, engaged in regular educational activities. Scientific and R &D institutions and other Government agencies accounted for the next largest share of the users (35.8%). The private industries and associations constituted only about 10.6% of the users. It, therefore, appears that CDS/ISIS has almost remained as a package for academicians, scientists and Government agencies. The detailed break-up is given in Table 3.

Type of Institution No Percentage

Scientific Institutions & Labs 243 17.5

Govt. Agencies 254 18.3

Academic Institutions 590 42.5

Private Agencies & Associations 147 10.6

Non-Govt. Organizations 79 5.7

International Agencies 13 0.9

Others 63 4.5

Type of Applications

Surveys conducted so far reveal that about 90% of the institutions which received the package are actually using the same for various applications. An analysis of the users indicates that about 63.7% of them use the package for bibliographic purposes and 62.1% use the same for cataloguing/indexing services. About 24.7% of the users also use the package for current awareness. On an average, the institutions are using the package for more than two applications. The details are given in Table 4.

Type of a Application Number Percentage

Acquisition 30 16.5

Bibliography 116 63.7

Budgeting 8 4.4

Cataloguing/Indexing 113 62.1

Circulation 11 6.1

Current Awareness 45 24.7

Serial Control 21 11.5

SDI 17 9.3

Union Catalogue 15 8.2

Others 27 14.8

Several institutions are also using other packages along with CDS/ISIS for library applications. The packages used and the percentage of institutions using are given in Table 5.

Table 5 : Percentage of Institutions Using Other Packages for Library Automation

Package Number Percentage

CDS/ISIS 110 90.9

SANJAY 3 2.5

ILMS 3 2.5

Dbase/Foxpro 36 29.8

LIBRIS 2 1.6

LIBSYS 9 7.4

Wordprocessing Packages 20 16.5

Others 21 17.4

It has been realized from the very beginning that generation of skilled manpower is essential for the successful implementation of the package. Training of information scientists and librarian has, therefore, been given high priority in the NISSAT activities. A series of short, medium and long-term training courses for practising information scientists, working librarians was conducted.

The long-term courses are mainly meant for providing post-graduate level training to professional information scientists in the application of computer technology in information processing and library automation. These courses are now being conducted by the Documentation & Research Training Centre (DRTC).

The short-term courses are generally conducted with the help of library associations and other regional agencies. These programmes broadly cover the following areas:

• Introduction to computers;

• Practical exposure to operating systems;

• Online searching;

• CDS/ISIS, IDAMS, SANJAY, etc.; bibliographic formats.

Since 1986, 177 courses on CDS/ISIS and other subjects were sponsored by NISSAT 3469 professionals were trained. The number of training courses and trainees were also the largest in North India with Delhi accounting for 29.4% courses and 28.6% trainees. The region-wise distribution of courses and trainees is given in Table 6.

Table 6: Region-Wise Distribution of Trainees and Training Courses

Region No. of % Share No. of %

Courses Trainees Share

North 67 37.8 1300 37.5

South 43 24.3 843 24.3

West 20 11.3 337 9.7

East 46 26.0 966 27.8

North-East 01 0.6 23 0.7

Total 177 100.0 3469 100.0

Shareware Applications/Utilities

An important advancement in the use of CDS/ISIS is the development and availability of a number of shareware packages/utilities. The details of few of them are listed below.

Program Name Purpose Source Availability

SHOW Attached to options say B & D in ISISRET allows UNESCO NISSAT

scrolling through records

FMT Attached to option W in data entry and option UNESCO NISSAT

F in ISISRET shows available formats

NEWDB Attached as option in the database definition UNESCO NISSAT

menu automatically creates a database

HEURISKO A search interface that allows database selection, UNESCO NISSAT

searching and printing (distribution)

FANGORN Conversion of databases from host computers UNESCO NISSAT

(ASCII files) or CD-ROMs into a form

that can read into a CDS/ISIS database

CCFMARC CCF - converter from MARC to CCF and CCF to MARC UNESCO NISSAT

DB3ISO Exporting database

ISODB3 from Dbase III to CDS/ISIS and vice versa, Program will UNESCO NISSAT

export memo fields also.

GMOD Global change on fields of range of records UNESCO NISSAT

SDI Production of SDI outputs from CDS/ISIS database UNESCO NISSAT

IDIS Data description & data transfer between UNESCO NISSAT

micro - ISIS and IDAMS

SANJAY Automation of all the functions of a library NISSAT Rs. 15,000

Thrishna Devnagiri version of CDS/ISIS Package NISSAT NISSAT

NEWSDI Production of SDI outputs from CDS/ISIS databases ICRISAT NISSAT

Future

NISSAT should concentrate on organizing systematic training courses in different regions of the country, creating awareness about the advanced features of the package and on developing customized application packages. An important activity will be the documention of information relating to CDS/ISIS based products and its dissemination. It will also be the endeavour to promote regional user-group meetings to ensure larger participation of institutions and experts in the effective use of the package.

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* Presented at the Seventh CDS/ISIS Users Meet, Bhubaneswar, 26-28 November 1997.