Annual Report April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016
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Annual Report April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016 ya e- Achar ICSSR e-Shodh Sindhu Data Ser InfoPort vice athshala NIRF P Institute VID anking PG W Shodhganga OJAS AN e- University R Indcat SOUL 2.0 IR Information and Library Network Centre, Gandhinagar Annual Report (April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016) Information and Library Network Centre Gandhinagar 2016 From the Director’s Desk Dr. Jagdish Arora Director It is my pleasant duty to present the Annual Report of the INFLIBNET Centre for the year 2015 – 2016. The year has been remarkable and eventful in terms of number and scope of additional projects and programmes, sheer volume of positive progress, their reach and impact. The detailed reports that follow this introductory provides ample evidence of such exceptional achievements that characterized agility and dedication of young team of scientists at the Centre. During the year under report, three major projects, namely e-Shodh Sindhu, NIRF and ICSSR Data Repository were awarded to the INFLIBNET Centre. It is indeed a matter of pride and privilege that the task of operating and executing the e-ShodhSindhu: Consortium for Higher Education e- Resources (CHEERs), formed by merging three existing national-level consortia namely, UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium, INDEST-AICTE Consortium and N-LIST is assigned to the INFLIBNET Centre. The process of negotiation of rates of subscription for all existing e-resources subscribed by the three consortia individually for the member institutions was carried out soon after the release of notification on formation of unified consortium. It was indeed a herculean task to negotiate rates of subscription for more than 40 e-resources catering to the diverse needs of various categories of institutions, i.e. colleges, universities and centrally-funded technical institutions. A detailed account on e-Shodh Sindhu and some of its major achievements are given in the report. However, larger agenda and objectives of the consortia spelled out in the report would be addressed during the year ahead. The “ICSSR Data Service: Social Science Data Repository”, a project awarded to the INFLIBNET Centre by the ICSSR added a new dimension to the array of activities done by the Centre. Setting-up of social science data repository is culmination of signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) which, in turn, provides for setting-up of repository and hosting of NSS and ASI datasets generated by the Ministry into the repository. The first Meeting of the stakeholders for setting-up of ICSSR Data Repository was held at INFLIBNET Centre, Gandhinagar on 3rdJuly, 2015 wherein initial exploratory work done by the Centre on the project was demonstrated to the experts and road map for developing the repository in to a full-fledged data service was presented to the members. Plan of action to establish and launch the Repository was prepared during this meeting based on the advice of the experts. The Data Repository, designed using NADA, a open source software, hosts 33 datasets and is ready for launch. Annual Report (April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016) INFLIBNET Centre - i - The project on development of web-portal for the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), a prestigious initiative of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), was awarded to the INFLIBNET Centre. The NIRF framework outlines a methodology to rank institutions of higher education across the country in different disciplines and categories. The core committee, set up by the MHRD, identified approximately 22 parameters under five major categories, namely, i) Teaching, Learning and Resources; ii) Research, Consulting and Collaborative Performance; iii) Graduation Outcomes; iv) Outreach and Inclusivity; and v) Perception. The Centre developed web-based portal to capture data required for ranking of universities, colleges and other institutions desirous of ranking themselves in six categories, namely Engineering, Pharmacy, management, Architecture, Colleges and Universities. Besides, the Centre also created an Excel Utility to capture institutional data on various parameters offline and upload it on online Data Capturing System. The Centre also provided publications and citations data from Web of Science, Scopus and Indian Citation Index for more than 3,500 institutions who have applied for ranking themselves under NIRF. The Centre, with guidance of NBA, ranked research and teaching institutions (Category A) in Engineering, Management, Pharmacy and University. The India Ranking 2016 would be announced in the month of April 2016. While taking new projects and schemes, it was ensured that our existing initiatives are not neglected. Shodhganga: a repository of full-text theses in Indian universities has grown by leaps and bounds during the year under report. As on 31st March, 2016, 260 universities have signed MoU on Shodhganga with the INFLIBNET Centre including 59 universities who signed the MoU during the financial year under report. Total numbers of theses deposited in the repository have grown to more than 72,000 including 35,200 theses that were uploaded during the year under report. A plagiarism detection platform is provided to eligible universities who are signatory to the MoU with the INFLIBNET Centre on Shodhganga. Urkund, one of the leading plagiarism detection software, is being provided to 143 universities under this scheme. With active intervention of Additional Secretary and Vice Chairman, UGC, the activity of content creation continued with greater vigour and fervour under e‐PG Pathshala project funded by the National Mission on Education through ICT. New features and functionalities were added to the open source Learning Management System used for hosting e‐content created under the project as well as to the e‐Pathshala Management System developed in‐house to manage the administrative workflow as well as serve as a platform that facilitate interaction among the team members of each subject and track the work progress made by stakeholders. 67 Principal Investigators (PIs) identified for different subjects and their teams of paper coordinators and content creators contributed a large number of modules that were uploaded on to e‐Pathshala LMS. As on 31st March, 2016, e-PG Pathshala hosted more than 5,635 e-texts, 1,957 videos in 724 papers and in 67 subjects involving more than 3,000 experts. Although it is not possible to cover every project and programmes in my address, however, notable progress was made in all of them including Vidwan, SOUL software, e-Acharya, IndCat, Shibboleth- based access management system, etc. With availability of excellent physical and ICT infrastructure, the Centre has re-committed itself to the task of imparting training to librarians and to nurture their library-related ICT-skills through training programmes, workshops and conferences. The Centre had released its Training Calendar in the Annual Report (April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016) INFLIBNET Centre - ii - beginning of year wherein 30 training programmes were announced during the year on different library-related ICT-skills. During the year under report, 57 training programmes, workshops and seminars were organized at INFLIBNET Centre as well as in other universities and colleges in the country on topics ranging from SOUL 2.0, e-resource awareness, plagiarism detection, e-learning and content creation, creation and management of digital collections, content management system, bibliometrics and research output analysis, electronic theses and dissertations, cloud computing and virtualization, copy cataloguing, etc. These training programmes also included three National Workshops on Capacity Building Programmes for Public Library Professionals organized at the INFLIBNET Centre with funding from the National Mission on Libraries, Ministry of Culture. These programmes benefitted 6,061 library professionals and other users. A brief write-up on each of these workshops, training programmes and conferences are given in the report. In addition, the Centre collaborated with Jawaharlal Nehru University and National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) for organizing ETD India 2015; the first International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations in India. The Symposium was organized between 4th& 6th November, 2015 at Convention Centre, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on the theme on “Evolving Genre of ETDs for Knowledge Discovery”. The main theme of the Symposium was further divided into four sub-themes, i.e. Managing ETDs, ETDs for Research & Development, Legal & Ethical Issues for ETDs and Tools & Technologies for ETDs. One of the sessions during the Symposium was devoted to Shodhganga and major activities and services by the INFLIBNET Centre related to ETDs. The INFLIBNET Centre is privileged to work with JSTOR for organizing the JSTOR India Users Forum for six consecutive years. During the year under report, two JSTOR India Users Forum were organized for one day each at the North-Eastern Hill University and University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram on 6th and 9th October, 2015 respectively. Both the Forum were well-attended and highly appreciated for its content and for the presentations made by the experts. 6th University Forum was organized by the INFLIBNET Centre and Elsevier Science with Japan as partner country. The 6th University Forum focused on role of libraries in promoting research and scholarship.