Dear Colleagues, It is heartening to see that the government librarians from central and state governments advocating for open access to literature. Open access is not only about making the electronic copy of the literature available in public domain without charge and restrictions, it is also about making the literature discoverable by using basic metadata in publications. While doing literature review, I have encountered with numerous literature published by various agencies within Government of India and state governments without even basic metadata. There are some literature without even an identifiable title. Almost 50 percent documents do not have a publication date and no document has a mention of publication place, publisher, suggestion citation, not to mention standard book numbers (e.g. ISBN). Worse still, publishers do not seem to follow any guidelines in creating file formats. Hosting URLs change very often making citations untraceable within few months. NIC and DEITY are leading developing so many standards in the field of e-Government, eHealth, and other fields. Government information managers should be able implement at least basic bibliographic standards, adhere to procedure for publications, and making IRs hosting government publications. It seems that National Library and archive have already given up on this. It is recommended to set up a technical committee to come up with appropriate recommendations, implementation guidelines, and technical support to the line ministries/ government agencies to improve the situation. With best, Atanu ------------------------------------------------------ Atanu Garai OMEGA Technical Assistance Support Team IPE Global State Institute of Rural Development Campus OMEGA Cell, Ground Floor, Near Stewart School, Unit-8 Bhubaneswar – 751012, India T+ 91.674.6511.307 | F: + 91.674.256.2529 www.ipeglobal.com ------------------------------------------------------ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.