The paper presents a succinct profile and contributions of Indian LIS education since its inception. It also attempts to bring to the fore how this profile presents its international potentiality and perspective scenario in context to developing countries.
Dr. Eugene Garfield was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), USA and a pioneer in the field of citation analysis. He founded the ISI in 1960 and developed an indexing system for science literature, the Science Citation Index, based on the analysis of citations used within a given work. The ISI sold subscriptions to their publications the Science Citation Index, and over time grew to include the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). These databases now form the foundation of the online research tool called the Web of Knowledge. The ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific and Healthcare in 1992. Dr. Eugene Eli Garfield died on 26 th February 2017 at his home state, Pennsylvania, USA. Is this quite sufficient to state about his demise and the legacy he has left behind? That is not quite so. To venture to write homage to Dr. Garfield would be a vain bargaining in order to profile his astounding contributions to the field of Library and Information Science in general. His application of citation analysis and the "Metrics' in specific, to the bibliographic data, once quite ignored and looked upon merely as a list that is appended to a periodical article or to a thesis submitted to an academic degree, would be a delegacy to the generations to come, and nurture it for further research. Dr. Garfield considering its importance, gave a new iconic image to the "Bibliographic References" as the 'Citations" to reckon their hidden values, and not only to assess and evaluate the paper contributors, but to the extent to predict the next Nobel Laureates in sciences.
The studies on the user, user information behaviour, and seeking have been continuing since last 50 years or more. Ranganathan's five laws brought the phrase 'use' reordering from preservation. The studies on user and user behaviour with varying characteristics has not changed and still going on to study the impact of ICT and use of electronic resources. Several hidden revelations on users' approach to information identified by Voigt, types of readers identified by Ranganathan and the ASK model by Belkin have been expounded to visualise the user categories and attributes of the user, user information behaviour and so on. The aim of this paper is only a perspective review of the literature on information user, with an intrinsic scope for some new research possibilities in this area.
India has the legacy of Susrutha and Charaka, its ancient medical practioners but the scholarly literature on modern medicine is scanty. The bibliographic work carried out by Dr John Shaw Billings is unmatched. Due to his contribution the Index Medicus (now-MEDLINE) stands as the most important database of biomedical literature. The services of MEDLINE were extended to all countries over the years and India had its services through MEDLARS Centre at NIC. The coverage of Indian medical literature in MEDLINE was not comprehensive and this affects visibility of Indian medical research output. So Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) launched IndMed and MedInd. There are no studies investigating the coverage, the services and the gaps in coverage of IndMed. This study seeks to assess the extent of Indian medical journals covered by the IndMed comparing the list of medical and allied sciences journals covered by Indian Science Abstracts. Suggestions are made as to how the IndMed can improve its coverage.
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