Architecture and building of Medical Digital Library at NIC [of India]: What exists and what is required for MeDLib@NIC?

Abstract

ICMR-NIC Centre for Biomedical Information has developed various products that are available over Internet. These includes: i. UNcat (http://uncat.nic.in) - union catalogue of journal holdings of medical libraries of India; ii. IndMED (http://indmed.nic.in) - A bibliographic database of Indian biomedical journals and iii. medIND (http://medind.nic.in) - full texts of Indian biomedical journals being indexed in IndMED. Now, having these services, tools, databases and content in operation, the focus of future activities would be to integrate these "ingredients" both internally and externally to provide "single window digital access persistently". Here we propose an architecture under which each service, tool, database and content collection is an independent layer. These layers are the building blocks of Digital Library (DL) and can interoperate with each other due to either build-in or plug-in(ed) interoperability. They are accessible by their own interfaces as well as through Digital Library interface. In context of the proposed architecture, this article also takes stoke of what is available and what is required to build the digital library.