Page 251 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Information Sources and Services

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Cataloguing-in-Publication Project: Problems and Solutions
Cataloguing-in-publication (CIP) in India is a free cataloguing service offered to Indian
Publishers by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India for the books which are in the
process of being printed. Each CIP entry will be added to the National CIP database which
will be freely accessible online by users, publishers, librarians and all those interested in
Indian publications. On 8th November 2009, the advisory Board of the National Library of
India discussed the importance of Cataloguing-in-publication programme at its meeting.
After this meeting, the Ministry of Culture constituted a committee to prepare a report for
the implementation of CIP in India. The chairman submitted the report to the Ministry of
Culture on 30th April 2010. The then Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Culture facilitated
the processing of the report and its approval. The CIP agency selected to prepare CIP
records in different parts of India will be required to use the following standards like
MARC 21, AACR II, Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), LCSH and special internationally
known Subject Thesauri and UNICODE. It is decided that, in the first phase, CIP records in
the computerized form will be created in the 12 languages (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati,
Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu) besides
English. The CIP programme was first started by the Library of Congress and was followed
by the British Library. There are twenty-five active CIP programmes at present in the
world. But CIP programme in India is in initial stage only. There is no decision at
governmental level regarding the co-operation between CIP programmes and INB. Most
of the countries, the National Bibliographic Agency is responsible for creating the CIP
data and that data is also included in the National Bibliography. If INB also include the CIP
data, definitely it will also become more comprehensive and current. But in India, the Raja
Ram Mohan Roy Library Foundation (RRRLF), an autonomous body under ministry of
Culture, Government of India is the main agency responsible for CIP.
Problems and Solutions
A national bibliography should contain an authoritative and comprehensive records of
all publication published in a country and publish those records with shortest possible
delay with the accepted international standards. Characteristics of a national bibliography
are that it provides a current, timely, comprehensive and authoritative list of all titles
published in a country. In the case of Indian National Bibliography, it is totally depending
upon the books received from National Library under the Delivery of Book Act and at
present there is no control over the Delivery of Books Act. Some of the publishers are not
at all aware of the Act and some send their books very late to National Library and it takes
minimum three months to reach in the Central Reference Library. This affects the currency
of INB. The legal deposit legislation needs to be strengthened to make the publishers
aware of their obligations. There is very less effort for the amendment of the act at the
government level. Many developed nations amended their legal depositary Act so as to
include digital materials in their National Bibliographies as per the recommendations of
the ICNBS, 1998. So Delivery of Books Act needs to be changed in its totality. National
Bibliography should provide information as quickly as possible to the users who need it
for collection development, cataloguing purposes and information search. Being a National
Bibliographic Agency, CRL has to take necessary steps for the cooperative arrangements
with publishers, booksellers for the improvement of timely publication of the INB.
Criticism is there regarding the INB, in its lack of on-line accessibility. Efforts are going to
upload the data. National Informatics Centre has been entrusted for INB online. As an
experimental basis, some of the data is available on the net. A country with one language
and single script has many advantages in uploading the record in the net than a country
with several languages and multiple scripts. Therefore these problems crop up often.
Future of INB is very promising. But since it has to depend on the flow of book from the
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