Dear All, It is nice that our friend Mr.Amin has initiated a debate on Article indexing. Our experience at IGIDR library tells us that the job of indexing journal articles will be more expensive than subscribing commercial indexing/abstracting journal. Inspite of having required human resource, it would be difficult to have wide coverarge and to maintain quality par with international indexing/abstracting journals. The cost has been calculated considering the total cost to the institution, which includes salary and other perks such as CPF, accomodation, medical allowance, Gratuity, bonus, LTC, etc paid to one full-time LIS professional. More over, the features provided in search interface such as SPIRS and OVID are are so wonderful, which our inhouse indexing system may not be able to provide. However, it is worth indexing such Indian journals not covered in International indexing journals either individually or as a cooperative venture. IndMed has launched free online service to provide index to Indian medical journals. (http://indmed.nic.in) IGIDR library during Sept, 2005, has launched a free online index service titled 'Open Index Initiative', which is a cooperative effort to index Indian social science journals consisting of index to articles, books reviews and conference papers. This is based on RePEc and DOIS models ( http://oii.igidr.ac.in) This email does not intend to suggest any library to stop indexing work, rather intends to just share our experience. thanks g.k.manjunath CHIEF LIBRARIAN INDIRA GANDHI INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH FILM CITY ROAD ( GEN.VAIDYA MARG ) SANTOSH NAGAR GOREGAON ( EAST ) MUMBAI - 400 065 INDIA e-mail : gkm@igidr.ac.in http:// www.igidr.ac.in/lib/library.htm phone 022-28490653 fax 022-28402752

Friends: I am glad to see this topic being discussed. I appreciate Dr Manjunath's candid statement about the quality of indexes (or abstracts) prepared in house compared to the quality of indexes (or abstracts) produced by international abstracting services. If we look at the compensation package of our library staff, we are in a favourable position. The salaries paid by companies like ISI-Thomson and Chemical Abstracts Service is far higher and they would be happy to outsource much of their work to cheaper locations. Indeed, years ago, ISI outsourced their chemistry database (Index Chemicus, I guess) to a firm in Bombay Seepz zone. Even today many scientific journals published by some of the leading commercial publishers are practically being edited and produced in Chennai! It is because of the cost advantage, so many Indian BPO companies and call centres are thriving. In the case of those BPO companies they are able to deliver acceptable qualities of service to their clients abroad. Otherwise they will have to close their shops. Dr Manjunath feels that most Indian LIS professionals are not in a position to produce the same quality of service as international abstracting services, and I am sure Mr Amin agrees with him. One reason could be most Indian librarians are employed in sectors where anything goes and no one is ever asked to quit and go for poor quality work or incompetence, whereas BPO companies are run by hardnosed businessman who can extract quality work from their employees! I attended a meeting of a major LIS professional body recently and I spoke to senior officials of the body during tea time about the deplorable standards of the papers presented (or I should say 'read'). A senior professor told me that most people who keep talking about digital libraries are like sailors who have never been near a water body. When I asked one of the offce bearers why they have to put up with such poor stuff, he said unless people present papers they cannot get TA/DA from their institutions to attend the conference, and unless they attend the conference in large enough numbers, the conference cannot be held! Much of the costs of the conference is of course covered by sponsors whose names are prominently printed in the banner displayed on the stage. He said even IFLA conferences suffer from problems of quality. I do not have much experience with IFLA conferences, except for the two to which I was invited to speak (Barcelona and Edinburgh). I found the material presented of a reasonably good quality, by and large. Unfortunately they have national representatives who may come there in that capacity and some of them may not measure up to the standards expected of such conferences. But that is a small component. Let me tell you there are many committed people among our LIS professionals. I know of a young man who, only in his second job, persuaded the faculty and convinced the director of his institute about the advantages of setting up an open access archive at his institute, and now the director is planning to mandate OA for all research papers written by the faculty and students! That is just one example. All of us know the high quality of the GNU EPrints archive at the Indian Institute of Science set up by a team led by Prof. Balakrishnan and the late Dr Rajashekar. In every major secondary service you will see Indian names among the staff. Recently, I was at ICRISAT in connection with some sessions we are organizing at the forthcoming Science Congress and met with the Head of Knowledge Management and Sharing, who is known as a man hard to please. He referred to Mr Haravu, former head of Information at ICRISAT, in glowing terms and told me that Mr Haravu is rated very high and sought after by FAO and other international organizations even today, years after his retirement. I felt proud. On the otherhand, we organised two three-day workshops on setting up open access archives and 48 people attended the workshops, and virtually everyone promised that he/she would set up an institutional archive within a few months. We covered all expenses : train fare, lodging, boarding, course material, computers, Internet, standby generator, etc. Only half a dozen of them have set up an archive 18 months after the training. Dr Prasad of DRTC must have conducted at least a dozen training programmes on setting up institutional repositories. Dr Sreekumar at IIM-Kozhikode must have conducted four or five workshops. In short, like everywhere else we have all kinds of people - good, bad and indifferent. As we are a very large country, even if we have a small percent of good people, that would make up a large number. If we identify them and provide the right environment for them we can do well. Subbiah Arunachalam ----- Original Message ----- From: "G. K. Manjunath" To: "Saiful Amin" Cc: ; "Anuranjana Bharti" Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2005 1:38 PM Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] article indexing

Dear All,

It is nice that our friend Mr.Amin has initiated a debate on Article indexing.

Our experience at IGIDR library tells us that the job of indexing journal articles will be more expensive than subscribing commercial indexing/abstracting journal. Inspite of having required human resource, it would be difficult to have wide coverarge and to maintain quality par with international indexing/abstracting journals.

The cost has been calculated considering the total cost to the institution, which includes salary and other perks such as CPF, accomodation, medical allowance, Gratuity, bonus, LTC, etc paid to one full-time LIS professional.

More over, the features provided in search interface such as SPIRS and OVID are are so wonderful, which our inhouse indexing system may not be able to provide.

However, it is worth indexing such Indian journals not covered in International indexing journals either individually or as a cooperative venture.

IndMed has launched free online service to provide index to Indian medical journals. (http://indmed.nic.in)

IGIDR library during Sept, 2005, has launched a free online index service titled 'Open Index Initiative', which is a cooperative effort to index Indian social science journals consisting of index to articles, books reviews and conference papers. This is based on RePEc and DOIS models ( http://oii.igidr.ac.in)

This email does not intend to suggest any library to stop indexing work, rather intends to just share our experience.

thanks

g.k.manjunath CHIEF LIBRARIAN INDIRA GANDHI INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH FILM CITY ROAD ( GEN.VAIDYA MARG ) SANTOSH NAGAR GOREGAON ( EAST ) MUMBAI - 400 065 INDIA

e-mail : gkm@igidr.ac.in http:// www.igidr.ac.in/lib/library.htm

phone 022-28490653 fax 022-28402752

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