Development and Management of Indigenous Bibliographic and Full Text Databases

Abstract

In the fields of education and research generally three types of databases are newlinedeveloped and used. These are:- newline(a) Bibliographic databases which contain references to literature in a newlinesubject and in some cases abstracts also along with references. newline(b) Full text databases which contain the full texts of publications in a newlinedigitalized form and newline(c) Statistical databases which contain only statistical data, i.e. mostly newlinenumerical numbers with some textual lines for explaining or clarifying newlinethe numbers. newlineHowever, of late combinations of theses three databases and also of newlinepicture/graphics, sounds and with animation which are called Multimedia newlineDatabases , have come into extensive use. These multimedia databases are mostly newlineused in the entertainment sector although several of such databases are produced for newlinetraining and marketing activities. The information contained in the databases in newlinedifferent forms bibliographic, full-text, statistical and multimedia is usually, newlinereferred to as Database Content or Content in short. The development and updation newlineof the content is a major task in many organizations and is highly skill and newlineknowledge-based. Many organizations engage external agencies for developing the newlinecontent for their databases and this activity is developing as a big industry, which is newlinebeing called content development Industry . The overall size of this industry is newlinegrowing very fast and the National IT Taskforce constituted by the Prime Minister newlineOffice (PMO) during 1998 rightly identified its potential to be much large size than newlinethat of the software industry. newlineThese databases would naturally be of different qualities, interims of quality of newlinedata, presentation, information irretrievability and other relevant parameters. The newlineutility of the databases would mainly depend on such quality parameters. Since newlinedeveloping and maintaining a database is a costly effort, it would be worthwhile to newlineassess the databases qualitatively and present the findings so that if can help both their produces and users.