An e-mail-based bibliographic information server

Abstract

The National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), provides var ious computer-based information services to the researchers and scientists in academic and research and development (R & D) institutions in India. Foremost among them is the selec tive dissemination of information (SDI) service, provided in five different disciplines, using the appropriate abstracting/ indexing periodicals published by international bibliograhic agencies in computer-readable form on magnetic tapes. NCSI came on the e-mail network ERNET (Education and Research Network) - India's academic computer network - when its computer system, that runs under the UNIX environment, was connected to IISc's e-mail node through the campus- wide fibre optic network. With a view to providing better access to the bibliographic data which NCSI regularly acquires on tapes, an information server, bibserv, was devel oped that can be made available over ERNET from NCSI's computer system. An information server, or infoserver for short, is software that receives queries in predefined format by e-mail, executes the commands therein by searching the database and sends back the retrieved information or files by e-mail. The infoserver, bibserv, performs these operations on a bilbliographic database. It has the capabilities of: reading the mailbox to obtain the return address and the message lines from each mail arrived; parsing each line of the mes sage, which forms a command for the server, and executing the command if it falls within its set of built-in commands. The built-in commands are: help, which sends a help mes sage containing information on how to use the infoserver through e-mail; find, which finds and shows the number of records retrieved in response to a Boolean query; send, which sends the references and abstracts retrieved from the Boolean search executed, and list, which lists a page from the index of the database starting with a given keyword. To use bibserv, one can send an e-mail to bibserv@ncsi. iisc. ernet. in with one or more commands in the message body. Problems or queries relating to bibserv that require human intervention can be sent to help@ncsi. iisc. ernet. in. The bibserv software is written in the C language and implemented under UNIX System V Release 3.0. The search and retrieval modules that are developed for running the SDI service are utilised for bib serv. Sending the output file as the reply mail is imple mented by using system calls to one of the mail programs of the UNIX system. This paper describes the development and implementation of the bibserv software.