Page 249 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Information Sources and Services

Notes
faced in alphabetical arrangement of INB, while integrating Indian language scripts having
the heterogeneous characteristics in one sequence. In the initial stage CDAC’s GIST
technology was used for entering the language records. Now INB records are entered
using UNICODE and follow the MARC 21 standards. As per the guidelines of International
Conference on National Bibliographic Services (ICNBS) 1998, CRL started to record the
bibliographic details in the original script of the document and transliterated all the fields
for the National Bibliography. Thus Central Reference Library is in a position to publish
INB in Roman script as well as 14 language bibliographies in their language scripts
simultaneously after the implementation of UNICODE compliant software.
India is a multi-religious, multi-cultural and multi lingual country where linguistic
diversity is a part of the historical cultural heritage and an integral part of nation building
philosophy. 29 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers and
122 languages by more than 10,000. These are classified, belonging to four distinct linguistic
families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic, all of which have
some tribal speech communities. 22 languages are listed under 8th schedule of the Indian
constitution [which includes two tribal languages-Santhali and Bodo]. The scripts of South
and Southeast Asia have many structural similarities: most are phonetic, most are written
from left to right, most use spaces or marks between phrases, and so on. Most of these
scripts are derived from the ancient Brahmi script. Urdu, Sindhi and Kashmiri are usually
written in Perso-Arabic scripts. Sometimes they are written in Devanagari also. Apart
from Perso- Arabic scripts, the remaining ten scripts have evolved from the ancient Brahmi
script, and have a common phonetic structure, which allows a common character set
among these scripts.
Users

User groups and their context of use are changed in National Bibliographies from time to
time. National Bibliography is considered as the most important information resource for
the general public. Librarians, research scholars, publishers, booksellers, cataloguers etc.
are the main users of National Bibliography. Cataloguers use National Bibliography for
their cataloguing purpose. If the book is same, one can use the copy cataloguing facility
from an online National Bibliography. National bibliography can be a source of data
about country’s publishing output for official statistics. The Indian National Bibliography
has been serving scholars, librarians, publishers, book sellers and those interested in the
book world as a valuable tool of reference.
INB: Computerisation Project

Up to May 2000, entries for INB are catalogued manually. The irregular appearance of INB
has reduced its importance and a lot of thought has been put in for the revival of the
project. Therefore, in 1998, authorities of the Central Reference Library submitted a
proposal for the automation of the compilation of Indian National Bibliography to the
Department of Culture, Government of India, and the same was approved. Department of
Culture entrusted the Educational Consultancy Ltd., a Government of India undertaking
to advice on the matter. The first computerized INB monthly June 2000 came out using
TLMS software. The authority decided to adopt customized version of LibSys IV software
for its compilation. Transliteration of Indian language scripts is done through GIST
technology of C-DAC, Pune.

The software was running in UNIX platform and dumb GIST terminals were used for
typing the language script. So it was very much time consuming to type in language script
but generation of the bibliography was very easy and having the facility to generate the
classified part, Author and title index and Subject Index automatically. Customisation of
LibSys IV software took more than a year. The main problem faced at that time was that
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