Shantarakshita Library :: Journal & Periodical Section

Periodical section collects and manages the Journals, Periodicals, Newsletters, Bulletins, Reports Seminar proceedings etc. All these documents contain the latest information on current developments of a branch of knowledge. The library is making every effort to procure the maximum journals on Buddhist studies, Tibetan studies and allied subjects to facilitate the teaching and researches of the University. Section also procure and manage the current newspapers and general magazines.

The section has also compiled and regularly updating the article index of the academic periodicals. This index is searchable through the Library OPAC. At presents it has approximately 12000 article records.

The Periodical section of the Shantarakshita Library is subscribing the following important journals, bulletins, newsletters and newspapers.

Reference Section

Reference section manages about 3000 reference documents including, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Geographical sources, Year books, Directories, Biographical Directories,  Handbooks and Manuals Catalogues & Bibliographies.

The section has compiled an index of special articles published in the Britannica Book of the Year. This index can be accessed with the library database.

Based on the above collection and using Internet, Reference section is providing reference and referral services to the library users. The section performs necessary functions to help the users including providing various information service on demand and in anticipation, providing instructions for use of library, organizing orientation programs for the new students, selection of effective reference tools, organization of reference materials.

Stack Section

General stack section, holding the issuable document collection of the library is spread over two floors. About 40000 documents in English and Hindi languages are being managed by the stack section of the library. The section follows the Colon Classification 6th edition for subject wise stacking of the documents.

The first floor stack holds the documents of following subjects

• Linguistics
  
• Religion
  
• Philosophy
  
• Psychology
  
• Education
  
• Geography

Printed documents of all other subjects are stacked in the  ground floor stack of the library.

The Ground Floor stack also manages two non-issuable special collections namely Prof. L. M. Joshi Collection and Prof. Jagannanth Collection.

Reading rooms of 32 seating capacity (16 each) are attached with both stacks, for consultation and reading.

The section follows the open access system for document access, but junior students are advised to bring the bibliographical details and classification number of the documents from the library OPAC (if they have precise requirement).

Digitization Project

Reference and stack section had actively participated in the Universal Digital Library Project of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Indian University of Science, Bangalore and contributed about 400, out of copyright documents in Devanagari script. These documents have been scanned at Indian University of Information Technology, Allahabad http://www.iiita.ac.in and uploaded on UDL server. Now this precious collection is in public domain and can be accessed from www.ulib.org. The section is planning to upload the pdf files of scanned documents on library server and to link these files with the bibliographical details of the documents to make these e-books accessible over campus LAN on library OPAC.

INFLIBNET Project

The Library is the active member of the INFLIBNET Centre www.inflibnet.ac.in of the University Grant Commission, New Delhi and using the Internet facility provided by the UGC under INFONET project.

INFLIBNET has trained four senior library professionals of the library on use of computers in library and library automation.

Periodical section is regularly contributing the list of currently subscribed periodical to Union Database of periodicals managed by INFLIBNET.

Bibliographical Records of 50,000 documents have been contributed in the union database of books maintained by the INFLIBNET.

The complete Bibliographical Records of Ph.D. thesis submitted in the University have been submitted in union database of thesis maintained by the INFLIBNET

Tibetan OCR Project

The institute is working with Indian University of Information Technology, Allahabad on a joint project of Ministry of Information Technology, Govt. of India, to develop the Tibetan Optical Character recognition (OCR).

The ground truth data and basic programming for the project has been done and it is expected to release the alpha version of the OCR in January 2008.