PETROLEUM GEOSCIENCE LIBRARY HOME PAGE - AN INDIAN CORPORATE LIBRARY CASE STUDY

This paper details how the ONGC library, at the R&D institute, KDM Institute of Petroleum Exploration (Dehradun, India) has employed a hybrid approach to incorporating digital resources into a new homepage. Digital resources for libraries continue to grow at a fast pace. New “born digital” materials and digital conversion of older materials are altering the collection landscape in libraries worldwide. Collection management is complex. The same resources may exist in widely differing formats such as print, microfiche, microfilm, audio or video tape, floppy disk, CD-ROM, DVD and online. The information products of various geosciences societies and institutions such as SPE image library, OTC, Journal of Petroleum Technology, created on CD-ROM during nineties do not run on new machines with latest operating system. Online offerings for the petroleum geoscientist include various databases and web pages. Databases may provide bundled of resources covering specific years to varying degrees. Coverage also varies in content from full text to bibliographic citation plus abstract. Subscription costs, multiple resources on varying platforms, copyright issues and appropriate coverage all contribute to content management complexity. Our first step was to identify core petroleum geosciences information resources for our user base. To do this we conducted a citation analysis of fifty years of petroleum geosciences literature in combination with a questionnaire distributed to five hundred geoscientists and petroleum engineers from the Indian petroleum industry. Next we reviewed the scope and depth of e-content offerings. We examined federated search options and metadata elements for optimum content retrieval. The final product is our library home page which provides a single gateway to our information services.