Indian MEDLARS Centre: Internet and biomedical information for the Indian Medical Professional

Naina Pandita, Shefali Sushil Dash
India National Informatics Centre, New Delhi, India

The Indian MEDLARS Centre (IMC) was set up in 1986 with the objective to meet the ever-increasing information needs of the medical professionals in the country. These professionals, who had to depend for information from their institutional/college libraries, had to look up voluminous printed resources which could be a tedious and time consuming task. IMC opened up vistas of information access for these professionals by providing information from National Library of Medicines (NLM) MEDLARS databases. With the Internet making in-roads, information became freely available at the click of the mouse. At this point IMC shifted its focus from content providers to content generators and developed services, accessible over the Internet, for the Indian medical professionals. A bibliographic database of 75 peer reviewed Indian biomedical periodicals was developed, which included journals not covered by any other international database.

This database, IndMED, is accessible free of cost from IMCs website, http://indmed.nic.in to the professionals within and outside the country. Simple and advanced search modes enable the professional to have a comprehensive retrieval. With indexing of journals being done using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) this database has been designed on the same format as NLMs MEDLINE database. IMC has also developed a Union Catalogue of Indian Biomedical Periodicals, which provides the holdings data of 180 biomedical libraries in the country and this is accessible free of cost from http://uncat.nic.in. This database can be searched by journal names or library names and provides details of the availability of the journals in these libraries.

The Centre is in the process of developing an Online full-text database of Indian biomedical periodicals and this would cover the 75 journals indexed in IndMED. This database, medIND would also be accessible free of any charge to the medical professionals and would serve as a one point access to all peer reviewed Indian biomedical literature. The Centres award winning website, ranked amongst the top 5 Indian health sites by Google directory, in addition to providing access to Indian biomedical literature, also serves as a portal to biomedical websites and e-journals.

This includes links to NLM databases and other sites, which are of relevance not only to the professional but also to the consumer, medical library professional and nursing professional. IMC conducts training programmes in information retrieval techniques enhancing the searching skills of medical professionals and making them more proficient in searching the biomedical resources available over the NET; the training material can be downloaded from IMCs website with a CD version also being made available. In this manner the Indian MEDLARS Centre has been and is serving the needs of the medical professionals as well other health care professionals using the Internet as the medium for information dissemination.