Digital Archiving:
Digital archiving is one of the major activities for libraries and information centers of research organizations. The process of research generates volumes of data/literature in various forms and is important for libraries to capture, classify, organize, store, and empower users with robust retrieval functionalities. ICAST has undertaken several initiatives in this direction and established multiple repositories on the Internet and Intranet with specific objectives.
Internet-Based:
CSIR-NAL Institutional Repository
NAL institutional repository is one of the earliest open access repositories of India established way back in the year 2004. The objective of the repository is to capture, organize, archive, and enable archived content on Green OA (Open Access) channel as per CSIR OA & publisher copyright policies. The repository is widely accessed and appreciated across the globe in the area of aerospace and allied subjects. A popular open-source software ‘Eprints’ is used to build NAL institutional repository.
Intranet-Based:
PRAKAS is designed and developed by ICAST to automate the publication approval process of NAL’s published and unpublished literature. It also aims at capturing both white (journal, conference papers, and book chapters) and grey (project documents, project proposals, SPs, TM, etc.) literature documents generated by NAL researchers. It assigns a unique number to all documents archived and facilitates easy retrieval. PRAKAS is automated to generate cover pages to PDs, SPs, TMs, and project proposals as per standards set by NAL. PRAKAS is developed using open source tools and framework.
System Engineering Repository (SysEng) is an Intranet based service provided by NAL-ICAST to cater to interdisciplinary scholarly information requirements of NAL Scientists and technologists. The repository mainly aggregates and hosts open access to scholarly resources available on the web in the aerospace domain. Certain category CSIR-NAL subscribed technical content is also part of the repository with access control to full-text documents. The repository is powered by ‘Eprints’ software with powerful search and browse functionalities.
SPoRts Repository
SPoRts (Student Project Reports Repository) is an archive of students (MTech/MSc/MBA/MCA/BE/BTech/) projects carried out at various divisions of CSIR-NAL. An Intranet-based repository is configured using ‘Eprints’ an open-source software with search and browse functionalities.