The Eighth Five Year Plan (1990 to 1995) of the National Informatics Centre is a blue print of action for the Organization. Each Leaf of NICPLAN presents an extract from the Plan to provide the Reader with an insight into just how the Organization visualizes the future. Today, three years since the plan was formulated, Readers will also be able to judge for themselves whether NIC is maintaining its course on time. In this issue we present the Biblio-Informatics Service Programme.
The demand for textual information from books and journals and the bibliographic information retrieval associated with it, is increasing on NICNET. The NIC-ICMR Bio-medical Information Centre, set up two years ago (in 1988) is servicing 1,000 queries coming from all parts of the Country every month. In addition, NIC subscribes to a number of bibliographic services on CDROM. This is being connected to NICNET for queries to be put on any of the nodes and automatic retrieval of bibliographic information from the CDROM. At the background of these accomplishments, which have proved highly useful, the following four projects are taken up on a much larger scale on NICNET:
- Bio-Medical Information Service Programme
- Internal BIBLIONIC Service Programme
- External BIBLIONIC Service Programme
- Telebase Programme
The present NIC-ICMR Bio-medical Information Centre will be enhanced into a much larger Bio-medical Information Programme on NICNET with all the MEDLARS tapes procured and updated from the National Library of Medicine at Bethsda, USA, for which NIC is already receiving USAID grants.
The Internal BIBLIONIC Service Programme will service through NICNET the information contained in the 96 CDROM-based databases for which NIC is incurring an annual subscription charge of Rs 80 lakh. A number of bibliographic information services are available through EASINET via VSN Gateway. The External BIBLIONIC Services will provide a bridge between EASINET and NICNET so that queries can emanate from any of the nodes of NICNET and serviced from databases abroad through VSN Gateway.
Though at present NIC is providing access to international databases in the area of medical information, there is a high demand for accessing other databases such as Bio-technology, dialogue databases etc. There is also demand for information on developments in India. It is therefore proposed to a general access system to support "Information Services" database in India. For broad-basing the facility, it is proposed to establish a gateway system in India in co-operation with the Telebase Organization in USA so as to act as the gateway hub of Telebase and EASINET to all the Countries in Asia and the Pacific. This is a revenue-earning proposition for NIC which with an investment of Rs 4 crore during the Eighth Five Year Plan can earn Rs 15 crore in foreign exchange during the same period.