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Identifying trends in research through co-citation or content analysis of journal contents is quite a common practice in LIS research. In this study, however, we proposed the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a popular topic-modeling approach for identifying research trends of published articles in three scopus-indexed Indian LIS journals. A total of 1213 titles & their abstracts published between 2011 and 2022 have been considered. From these data, a corpus of frequently used 15 key phrases was identified from each journal using Count Vectorizer and then ten topics having higher coherence scores were extracted from each journal corpus using LDA techniques to understand to what extent these topics are different in these journals. The analysis of the study indicates that 'Library users' studies' especially in academic libraries; and 'bibliometric indicators for measuring research growth are a few common topics in these journals and, technological innovation; utilisation of electronic and print information resources; library management; or network analysis are some of the topics that are journal specific. From the t-SNE visualisation and pyLDAvis diagram, it was seen that the topics of DJLIT are significantly unique with discrete distributions than the other two journals. On analysing the growth of the top ten topics longitudinally, it was seen that research on digital libraries, analysing the global output, online search strategy, ranking universities, etc. are concurrent interests of research among researchers while academic library resources, including electronic resources and its use, open access are among diminishing research interests of authors. Since the topic-modeling approach can provide results devoid of bias, it can be used to identify research land scape longitudinally as well as obsolescence of topic in a domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores the patenting activities of the faculty staff of the top 20 Indian academic and engineering institutes during 2011-2020 by excavating the Indian patent office database. Of the total 963 granted patents, the highest patents were published in 2016, and the academician of IIT Madras invented 167 patents followed by IIT Mumbai with 156 patents during this period. Most of the innovation takes place in the macro-field like chemical engineering, and micro-fields like nano-technology, nano-materials, and nano-complex. Collaboration with inventors of the same academic institution is found as the best choice of the inventors, only a meagre portion of patents was published in collaboration with of industries and organisations around the globe. The tag ‘highest number of patents inventor’ goes to Padma Shri Prof. Thalappil Pradeep of IIT Madras who has contributed 19 Indian patents in the last 10 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic information resources are increasingly become an important component of the collection-building activities of libraries. This paper attempts to understand how far the licenses of commercial publishers support resource optimisation in general and what other important issues that are usually ignored by publishers, knowingly or unknowingly, but are essential for better resource optimisation. Five international publishers namely Elsevier, EBSCO, Sage, Springer, and Taylor & Francis were identified and analysed their agreements that are available in public domain with some model agreements like Liblicense model and model license developed by John Cox Associate. Study indicates that core part of the negotiations still remain price, IP access, display, ILL/document supply, etc. while important issues like perpetual access, archiving, self-archiving, copy of individual articles and share the same for non-commercial use by authorised users were minor issues of the contract. Furthermore, most of the obligations of the publishers that are identified as core issues in Liblicense model are also absent in commercial publishers' license. A greater awareness of this to library managers is essential. They must be acquainted with the clause of the license agreement of commercial publishers and must negotiate to that extent so that the access should be uninterrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chhattisgarh State was formed in 2001 carved out from the then Madhya Pradesh. Ever since its establishment as a fully fledged state, a considerable number of academic institutions have sprungup. To promote education a Indian Institute of Management (IIM) and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) have been established along with universities and colleges. As libraries are heart of any institution, present study attempts to analyse the status of libraries in various academic institutions of Chhattisgarh with emphasis on status of automation and ICT applications and use. Survey method was followed to collect the data and six libraries were selected for detailed analysis. There are one central university, one state university, one special university, one open university, along with NIT and IIM. The results indicate that all libraries are discharging their services with functional library buildings. However, their collection is uneven and staff strength is less. Most of the libraries are yet to develop any collection development policies and still collection of non-book materials is very less. Although most of the libraries have implemented automation either by using Libsys or SOUL, staff of the libraries have required skill to handle various bugs in using software. Digitisation of collection is not well adopted in most of the libraries.To excel in services, staff training and staff appointment seem to be urgent need of these libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper was to identify the existing criteria of various conventional databases that are considered in evaluating journals in the scholarship of library & information science (LIS) journals and accordingly developed a tool box to evaluate some selected journals of LIS in South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. Journals have been evaluated by applying 30 criteria based on the current measures used by Thompson Reuter, SCOPUS, SciELO, LISA, LISTA, etc. The result indicates that although there are a considerable number of journals being published in India since long time, only a few journals are qualitatively strong. The review policy as mentioned in documentation, subject coverage can be considered as their strength, the geographic non-diversity of members in Editorial Board, contributors are their weakness. Most of journals are indexed in LISA and LISTA, however no journals are yet to include in JCR. Overall, to cope-up with international standard journals need to consider their publication policy thoroughly. The findings of the study seems to be useful for (a) academics - to know the list of journals which adhere to the quality requirements of LIS discipline; (b) librarians - to know the core LIS journals of SAARC countries in LIS discipline for their clients; (c) policy makers - to measure the weightage of publication, while evaluating performance for career and promotion, to evaluate individual research performance, while releasing grants for academic projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open access publishing is growing in importance, and, in parallel, the role of institutional archives has come to the forefront of discussion within the library community. The present study is an attempt to analyse the present trend of institutional archives worldwide. The factual data of each individual repository was collected from various Directories of Institutional Repositories by using survey method. Data was analysed in terms of quantity of institutional archives increased during last six years, country-wise contents of institutional archives, types of materials archived, subject coverage, software used, language of interface of institutional archives, host domains, and policy of institutional archives. The results of the study suggest healthy growth in terms of quantity of institutional archives' increase worldwide, however, the development is more prevalent in developed countries than developing countries. The subject analysis of the institutional archives indicates that the contributors in the field of health and medicine are more interested to submit their materials in repositories. Currently the institutional archives mostly house traditional (print-oriented) scholarly publications and grey literature, using DSpace software and most of these materials were of English language. However, the policy of content inclusion, submission and preservation is yet to be well defined in institutional archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]