Draft report of

11.2.4 Development and Maintenance of Union Catalogue (Books, Serials and other non book materials)

India’s higher education system comprising 360 universities and 17625 colleges has generated an enormous set of scholarly bibliographic resources. At present, access to and exploitation of these resources, other than at local level, is often patchy. INFLIBNET in 10^th five year plan had made an effort to develop digital repository of 142 university libraries wholly funded by UGC under library modernization programme. The Centre has developed online union catalogue which comprises of eight million bibliographic records and provided building blocks of resource-sharing infrastructure both at national and regional level for university libraries in India. The Centre is playing a pioneering role in helping academic libraries across the country to make them more productive, integrated and visible on the Web by providing access to materials that individual libraries do not own. It retrieves nation wide bibliographic data of over a hundred libraries through one single website, and serves as the best browsing platform for academic research and educational development. The access to union catalogue will expand its scope by incorporating records in other than English Language including French, Germen, Russian etc. besides all Indian Languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam etc. Not only the records from funded universities will be compiled during the XI plan, but also the bibliographic records of all academic libraries, R & D Institutions including colleges.