Types of Information Centres: Specialized, Government, and International

An information centre is more than a building full of documents. It is a focused service unit built around a defined community of users and a defined body of knowledge. A defence laboratory, a farmer, a patent attorney, and a school student all need information, but they need very different kinds of it, organised in very different ways. This is exactly why information centres come in so many forms. Understanding how they are classified helps you see the logic behind institutions like the National Informatics Centre or global systems like FAO AGRIS, and where each one fits in the larger information ecosystem. In this post we will work through four major ways of classifying information centres: by specialised interest, by ownership, by level of service, and by the variety of services they provide.

What an information centre actually does 🔗

Before classifying them, it helps to be clear about the core functions. An information centre selects, acquires, stores, and retrieves specific information for its users. It also announces, abstracts, extracts, and indexes that information, and then disseminates it either on request or in anticipation of a need. The key word is specific. Unlike a general public library that serves everyone with everything, an information centre is built around precise subjects and precise user groups. As one overview of the field puts it, these centres are neither ordinary libraries nor documentation centres but specialised activities designed to collect, organise, evaluate, compress, and disseminate information in a defined field. Because their purpose is so targeted, they can be grouped along several overlapping dimensions.

Types of information centres by specialised interest 🔗

The most common way to classify information centres is by the kind of knowledge they concentrate on. This dimension itself splits into three sub-types.

Subject-oriented centres 🔗

These centres are devoted to a single discipline or a closely related group of disciplines, such as social sciences, medicine, engineering, or agriculture. Everything they collect, index, and circulate revolves around that subject. A medical information centre, for instance, would build deep collections of clinical literature, drug databases, and research journals rather than trying to cover unrelated fields. The advantage is depth: a researcher gets material that has already been filtered for relevance to their domain.

Mission-oriented centres 🔗

Mission-oriented centres are organised around a goal or programme rather than a single academic subject. Defence, atomic energy, space research, and agricultural development are typical missions. Such a centre may draw on many subjects at once, because completing the mission demands a mix of physics, engineering, economics, and policy. The International Nuclear Information System (INIS) is a clear example. It covers the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology, which spans nuclear engineering, safety, radiation protection, chemistry, and even legal and economic aspects. The unifying thread is the mission, not the discipline.

Type-of-information centres 🔗

Some centres are defined by the form or category of information they handle rather than the subject. Industrial information centres, management information centres, and patent information centres fall here. The defining feature is the type of material, such as patents, standards, market data, or technical reports, regardless of the subject area it touches.

Types of information centres by ownership 🔗

A second way to classify these centres is by who owns and funds them. Ownership shapes their mandate, their funding, and who they ultimately answer to.

Government-owned centres 🔗

Government information centres are set up and funded by the state to serve public administration, planning, and citizens. The clearest Indian example is the National Informatics Centre. Established in 1976 under what is now the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, NIC provides nationwide ICT infrastructure and e-governance support. Through its network NICNET, it connects all central ministries, every state and union territory government, and hundreds of district administrations. Interestingly, NIC was nucleated in 1976 with financial assistance from the United Nations Development Programme, which shows how government and international support can combine. Government centres like this exist to improve service delivery, support decentralised planning, and increase transparency.

Private and corporate centres 🔗

Private organisations also run information centres, usually to serve their own commercial needs. A pharmaceutical company, a consultancy firm, or a media house may maintain a centre that supplies competitive intelligence, market research, and technical literature to its staff. These centres are tightly aligned with business objectives and their access is often restricted to employees or paying clients.

International and intergovernmental centres 🔗

The third ownership type is owned or operated by international bodies, often with many member countries contributing. The International Patent Documentation Centre (INPADOC) illustrates this well. It was founded in 1972 under an agreement between the World Intellectual Property Organization and the government of Austria, and it built computer records of bibliographic data from patent documents to provide patent information services worldwide. INPADOC pioneered the concept of patent families, grouping together patent applications originating from the same priority document, and it is now maintained by the European Patent Office. Such centres pool resources across nations to serve a global user community that no single country could support alone.

Types of information centres by level of service 🔗

Information centres also differ in their geographical reach. The same kind of subject centre can operate at very different scales, and the scale determines how data flows and who benefits.

Local and regional centres 🔗

At the smallest scale, a local centre serves a specific town, district, or institution. A district-level data centre, for example, may collect and supply information relevant to that administrative area. Regional centres cover a larger zone, such as a group of states or a part of a country, and act as a bridge between local needs and national systems.

National centres 🔗

National centres coordinate information for an entire country. NIC again fits here, since it functions as the technology backbone for governance across India while still operating through state and district units. National centres often act as the country’s single point of contact when joining a larger international network.

Global and international centres 🔗

At the widest level sit global knowledge hubs that serve users across the world. FAO AGRIS, the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology, is a model example. Created in 1974-75 under the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, it is a global public-domain database of bibliographic records on agricultural science and technology. What makes AGRIS especially instructive is its structure. It is a cooperative system in which member countries contribute references to literature produced within their own nations and in return gain access to material shared by everyone else. Each participating country runs a national input centre that feeds the global system. So a single farmer-facing query in one country can be answered using research indexed by hundreds of institutions worldwide. This layered design – local input feeding a global hub – is exactly what the “level of service” classification captures.

Types of information centres by variety of services 🔗

The final classification looks at what the centre actually delivers to users. Two centres in the same subject can offer very different service mixes, and many centres combine several of the following.

Current awareness services 🔗

Current awareness services keep users up to date with the latest developments in their field. A centre might circulate bulletins, table-of-contents alerts, or research-in-progress lists so that professionals do not have to scan every new journal themselves. A more personalised form is Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI), where new items are matched against an individual user’s interest profile and only the relevant ones are sent to them. The concept of SDI was first proposed by Hans Peter Luhn in 1958, and it remains a defining service of specialised centres.

Abstracting and digest services 🔗

Abstracting services provide condensed summaries of publications so users can judge relevance before reading the full text. A digest service goes a step further by periodically compiling and summarising information, sometimes in a magazine-style format. These services are especially valuable in scientific and technical fields where the volume of new literature is overwhelming. INIS, for example, builds its repository through member-state input that involves abstracting, descriptive cataloguing, and indexing as core activities.

Data banks 🔗

A data bank is a repository of factual or numerical information on one or more subjects, designed for direct retrieval of data rather than documents. Where a bibliographic service points you to literature, a data bank gives you the figures, properties, or statistics themselves. Scientific and technical data centres holding measured values, codes, or reference datasets are typical examples, and they often collaborate internationally to exchange validated data.

Product and referral services 🔗

Some centres specialise in product information services, providing access to information goods such as databases and commercial datasets along with alerting and market-research support. Others focus on referral, directing users to the right source, institution, or expert rather than supplying the information directly. The variety here is wide because the service mix is shaped entirely by what the centre’s users need.

Why these classifications overlap 🔗

One point worth stressing is that these four dimensions are not mutually exclusive. A single centre is usually described by all of them at once. AGRIS, for instance, is subject-oriented (agriculture), international in ownership, global in level of service, and it offers abstracting and bibliographic services. NIC is government-owned, national in level of service, and mission-oriented around e-governance. So rather than memorising four separate lists, it is more useful to treat them as four questions you can ask about any centre: What subject or mission does it cover? Who owns it? How far does its service reach? And what kind of services does it deliver? Answering all four gives you a complete picture of any information centre you encounter.

What do you think? If you were asked to set up an information centre for small farmers in your region, which combination of these four classifications would serve them best – and would a purely local centre or one linked to a global hub like AGRIS deliver more value? How might the rise of open digital databases change the way we classify information centres in the future?

References

1. https://www.nic.gov.in/
2. https://www.fao.org/agris/
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/information-centre
4. https://www.iaea.org/resources/databases/inis
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Informatics_Centre
6. https://nagaland.nic.in/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INPADOC
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGRIS
9. https://www.fao.org/agris/news/discover-agris-international-system-agricultural-science-and-technology-numbers
10. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376191030_Outline_of_Information_Services_in_Libraries
11. https://www.iaea.org/about/organizational-structure/department-of-nuclear-energy/division-of-planning-information-and-knowledge-management/nuclear-information-section