DIRECTOR’S REPORT 2019-2020 delnet DEVELOPING LIBRARY NETWORK JNU Campus, Nelson Mandela Road Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070, India I INTRODUCTION DELNET’s contribution to libraries and information centres, library professionals and millions of students, teachers and other general users during the last 28 years gives us satisfaction on one hand, and on the other, is a challenge for us to serve better all libraries, LIS professionals and general users in the country in the coming years. Every day new content is evolving and each day library users become curious to know about new developments that are growing in their fields of study. In each member institution of DELNET library committee members and other experts deliberate upon which books to purchase, and which journals to subscribe. This makes DELNET union catalogues and union lists very special in scope and size. With the proliferation of information, selection of quality content is becoming a major issue in the world. We are making serious efforts within our financial limitations to provide access to selected content through this shared network. The DELNET guest house is used by the heads and faculty of our member institutions periodically to conduct meetings, seminars, workshops and for staying purposes. The people concerned approve of the facilities and wish to use the guest house time and again in future. II MEMBERSHIP The institutions that are members of DELNET belong to various disciplines including Science and Technology, Engineering, Management, Social Science, Humanities, Arts & Science, Medicine and Pharmacy among other subjects. We have several academic institutions including universities and colleges that are members of DELNET. There is a regular increase in membership in these disciplines. We are indeed pleased to note that arts and science colleges have also started joining DELNET and availing of its services. Our membership drive during the year continued in its modest way by writing to new institutions and arranging DELNET demonstrations in some of them. We have also arranged workshops and lectures for academic staff and students of some institutions as our objective is to serve LIS staff and through them their library users including students, teachers, scholars, researchers and the public with quality information resources and services. I am glad to inform you that 476 institutions joined DELNET during 2019-20, out of which 356 were new libraries and 120 rejoined DELNET to avail of its services. The increase in membership has been from almost all states. The states from where the number has been more include Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. We notice that academic libraries including those in Engineering & Technology, Pharmacy, Arts and Science Colleges were greater in number among the new members that joined DELNET in 2019-20. The detailed breakup of DELNET membership is given in Appendix I. 3 III FINANCE Within its limited finance generated through annual membership fees DELNET has been managing its operations without increasing its annual membership fee since 1999. We do not seek any external funding and hope that our membership base expands so as to serve many libraries and their users. While our information resources have increased multifold, we hope that all libraries will continue to use DELNET for offering better services to their users. The details of income and expenditure for 2018-19 are given in the audited statements of accounts. The auditing of accounts was done by M/s S.S. Kothari Mehta & Co. I may mention that as per the government’s directive, GST audit has become essential. As such, GST audit was also conducted by M/s S.S. Kothari Mehta & Co. The property tax for 2019 was paid to the MCD. IV DELNET BUILDING The DELNET Hostel Block (Guest House) is fully functional now and is used extensively by the member-institutions and those recommended by them for organising seminars, conferences, official meetings and for staying purposes. Both the Admin Block and the Hostel Block are maintained very well. Some of the institutions who have availed of the Guest House facilities for organising meetings, workshops, conference and staying purposes, during the year includes AIIMS New Delhi; Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar; Central University of Odisha, Koraput; Central University of Punjab, Bathinda; Central University of South Bihar, Gaya; IIM Bodh Gaya; IIM Indore; IIM Jammu; IIM Shilong; IIM Visakhapatnam; Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Thiruvananthapuram, NIEPA New Delhi and many others. The details about the guest house tariff for various facilities is mentioned in Appendix II. V NETWORK OPERATIONS 5.1 Online Services DELNET’s online services are operational 24/7. The features of the new discovery portal of DELNET continue to give access to DELNET resources in a well organised manner. The access is mostly IP-based as well as through login and password for remote access. Features such as Date of Expiry of Membership, Usage Statistics, ILL Book Status, etc. in the discovery portal are found useful by members. In order to support online services with the facility of having parallel systems, we have upgraded the hardware infrastructure. This will also safeguard some of the data security concerns of DELNET’s online resources. 5.2 Internet Leased-Line with NIC The 2 Mbps Internet Leased-Line (MTNL) with NIC is working well. 4 5.3 Knowledge Gainer Portal The Knowledge Gainer Portal was launched this year. It offers access to full- text E-books, E-journals, E-articles, Institutional Repositories, etc. which are more than 90 lakhs in number and this number is increasing steadily on a daily basis. The resources in this portal cover various subjects including Engineering & Technology, Management, Medicine, Pharmacy, Social Science, Humanities, Arts & Science, etc. for Graduate and Postgraduate students, researchers and teachers. VI INTER-LIBRARY LOAN (ILL) AND DOCUMENT DELIVERY SERVICES (DDS) Resource sharing among libraries is the main objective of DELNET. As such Interlibrary Loan (ILL) and Document Delivery Service (DDS) have become the two main processes to accomplish this objective. Millions of students and teachers in our member institutions have access to the vast resources DELNET offers for research and reference. During the last year there has been a continuous use made of the resource sharing facilities of DELNET. It has been observed that proactive librarians borrow more publications through DELNET than the others. In order to make LIS professionals increasingly conversant with DELNET resources and services we organise almost every month workshops for them in different parts of India. These workshops help to promote the technical know-how among LIS professionals. The ILL staff and the Network Manager also locate resources needed by member-libraries which are not listed in our union catalogues and union lists. DELNET Coordination Units in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune have helped in ILL/DDS work in their respective regions and also coordinated well with DELNET ILL staff at New Delhi. VII COORDINATION UNITS The Coordination Units which function in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune have regularly offered hand-holding services to member-libraries, offering support for ILL/DDS, collecting catalogue data and also contacting non-member libraries for membership. These units have been well managed by Mr. O. N. Safapuri in Bengaluru, Dr. S. S. Murthy in Hyderabad and Dr. Neela J. Deshpande in Pune. The staff working in these units also conduct orientation programmes from time to time. DELNET has developed a centralised online portal for the DELNET Coordination Units which enable them to check the membership renewal status, centralised registering for new membership enquiries, other specific requests received from the institutions in the regions, etc. It also helps in strengthing the communication between DELNET, New Delhi and the respective units and also with the member-institutions of the region. The portal has been made operational. 5 VIII UNION CATALOGUES AND DATABASES There has been a regular increase in the union catalogues and union lists that are accessible through the discovery portal of DELNET. About three crore and twenty- five lakh records are available for use by library staff, students, teachers, faculty, researchers and scholars of member-libraries. In addition to the union catalogues and union lists, we have been offering access to E-books, E-journals, journal articles, theses and dissertations among other resources. The union catalogues and union lists are updated on a regular basis. The growth of these catalogue resources depends on how soon member-libraries catalogue their new additions in their libraries and how fast they send them to DELNET for merging purposes. I would like to mention that librarians of member-libraries should regularly send catalogued records so as to make the union catalogues of DELNET more up-to-date and more useful for themselves and for other member-libraries. In the event of any loss of data in a member-library the member- library can retrieve its data from DELNET if the updated data was sent to DELNET. The DELNET portal also serves as a Web OPAC for their own library collections. The more they share the catalogue data, the more updated would be their library resources represented in DELNET’s discovery portal. The following are the union catalogues and databases that are regularly updated by DELNET: 1. Union Catalogue of Books 2. Union Catalogue of Periodicals 3.