Electronic databases: the Indian scenario

Computer usage has become commonplace and there has been an increasing number of local efforts in organising indigenous information for individual and institutional utility. Access to information online or in CD‐ROM media is now just a matter of money; at the same time access to indigenous information has remained a challenging effort both for the user and the infomediary. Information services/products of all kinds are being generated by various agencies in the government, public and private sectors and are emerging out into the Indian information marketplace. There are a number of abstracting journals, which, in a natural process of migration, are now available in dual formats – print as well as machine readable. Besides bibliographic information, service providers are generating factual information – as directories of all descriptions, financial and commercial data, full texts of case laws, export‐import policy and so on. In this paper an attempt is made to present an overview of some of the important electronic databases developed in India or on Indian topics.