Objectives and Responsibility
Creation of union databases of Books, Serials, Theses etc. has been one of the major objectives of INFLIBNET and the Database Research and Development group has been set up to address the problems involved in the development, maintenance, updating of these union databases. Development of software tools for converting data from one format to another, effective retrieval and managing the databases are the major areas of work undertaken by this group. Future planned activities include research and development of retrieval software for multilingual, multimedia and full text databases. Distribution of databases through the medium of CD-ROM is also going to be a thrust area for database research and development group.

Major Activities

• Database design, analysis and technical support.
• Assisting participating libraries in database development.
• Development of utilities for database creation, conversion and maintenance in different formats like CCF and MARC 21 etc.
• Development of Utility tools for Retrospective conversion of union catalogues.
• Development of software tools for Multilingual Database of union catalogues.
• Administration (routine jobs like backup, tuning and implementation of security policies etc) of Union Database servers in the Centre.