National Informatics Centre on Spices

The IISR Library was set up to provide support to research activities of the institute and to function as national information storage, retrieval and dissemination system for spices and related areas. The IISR library provides support to research and development work of the Institute by acquiring global scientific literature, organizing them for ease of use and better access. It also caters to the needs of the scholarly community of other institutes, universities and organizations. The infrastructure facilities of the library have been expanding continuously, the latest being the establishment of National Informatics Centre on Spices. This was inaugurated by Dr. SL Mehta, DDG (Edn.), ICAR, New Delhi on 28th November 1998 to serve as a documentation centre for disseminating information on various aspects of spices.The recent years witnessed the transition of the library from a conventional to an electronic one by embarking upon library automation, subscription of e-journals, offline and online databases, Internet connectivity etc.

The institute library was shifted to the new library building and was inaugurated by Dr. H.P Sing, DDG(Hort.), ICAR on 18 March, 2008 with excellent digital accessibility and storage facility. The library has been automated with LIBSYS software. All the books were bar coded for easy retrieval. LAN and Internet connectivity with independent nodes and server were added. A web portal of the library called ‘SpicE-Library’ was launched on 30 May 2006 by Prof. S. Kannaiyan, Chairman, NBAI, Chennai. Besides, an institutional repository named ‘D-Spice’ has been developed using the Open Software D-Space. The Library aims at acquiring scientific literature related to spice crops and various scientific disciplines of interest to the scientists, organizing and displaying these materials and making them available to users.The library provides bibliographic services published in Journal of Spices and Aromatic Crops and a monthly online news service AGRI Titbits is also publishing.