Walk into any Indian university library today and a student can pull up a journal article published in London or Boston within seconds. That seamless access did not appear overnight. It is the result of nearly four decades of patient network-building that began when computers in different institutions could barely talk to one another. The story of how libraries here moved from card catalogues and isolated machines to shared digital platforms is really the story of telecommunications, government policy, and a handful of pioneering networks that stitched scattered collections into a connected whole.
Table of Contents
- Early developments and the telecommunication push of the 1980s
- From isolated machines to shared resources
- The role of NICNET and NISSAT
- NICNET: the government’s communication backbone
- NISSAT: the catalyst for library networking
- Major library networks in India
- INFLIBNET: the national flagship
- DELNET: from a city network to a national presence
- CALIBNET and the city networks
- Growth of IT and the internet in library networks
- From union catalogues to digital consortia
- UGC-INFONET and e-ShodhSindhu
Early developments and the telecommunication push of the 1980s
Before libraries could share resources electronically, the country needed the basic plumbing: data communication links that could carry information between cities. For most of the post-independence period this simply did not exist. Computers were expensive, rare, and worked in isolation. The 1980s changed that.
The decisive moment came in 1986, when the Education and Research Network (ERNET) was launched by the Department of Electronics with funding support from the Government of India and the United Nations Development Programme. ERNET connected eight premier institutions, including the Indian Institute of Science and five IITs, and is widely credited with bringing the internet to the country. In its earliest form it used UUCP-based email exchange over dial-up links, and by the early 1990s it had moved to leased lines and full TCP/IP connectivity between major cities.
Around the same time, the country’s first data communication networks were taking shape. CMC Limited set up an early computer network in 1986, and the Department of Telecommunications later commissioned INET, an X.25-based packet-switched public data network that connected several cities. These technologies mattered enormously for libraries because they made the idea of resource sharing technically possible for the first time.
From isolated machines to shared resources
Libraries had always understood the value of cooperation. No single library, however large, can buy every book and subscribe to every journal. The traditional answer was inter-library loan, but that was slow and paper-bound. With data communication links now available, professionals began to imagine something faster: shared catalogues, electronic requests, and pooled collections accessible from a distance. The telecommunications advances of the 1980s turned that imagination into a workable plan.
The role of NICNET and NISSAT
Two government initiatives sit at the centre of this early history. One built the communication backbone; the other championed libraries specifically.
NICNET: the government’s communication backbone
The National Informatics Centre (NIC) was established in 1977 to support government planning and decision-making with computing power. Its nationwide network, NICNET, became operational in the late 1980s and grew into a satellite-based system linking central ministries, state capitals, and hundreds of district headquarters. NICNET used a master earth station in New Delhi connected to micro earth stations across the country, with packet switching to route data efficiently.
For libraries, NICNET offered something valuable: ready-made infrastructure. It provided email, bulk file transfer, teleconferencing, and bibliographic retrieval services that information centres could tap into instead of building their own expensive communication links. Several emerging library networks leaned on this backbone to reach their members.
NISSAT: the catalyst for library networking
If NICNET supplied the wires, the National Information System for Science and Technology (NISSAT) supplied the vision. Set up in 1977 under the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, NISSAT was tasked with developing national information systems and services. It became the single most important promoter of library networking in the country.
NISSAT’s approach was practical. It funded feasibility studies, set up network service centres with hardware, software, and trained staff, and provided seed money to get city-level networks off the ground. As one detailed account of DELNET’s origins notes, NISSAT deliberately limited itself to building general infrastructure and let individual networks develop their own services. This made it the common parent of an entire generation of library networks, including those in Calcutta, Delhi, Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Bombay.
Major library networks in India
From the late 1980s onward, a cluster of networks emerged. Some were city-based, others national in ambition. A few grew into lasting institutions while others faded as technology moved on.
INFLIBNET: the national flagship
The Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre stands out as the most consequential of all. It was set up as a major programme of the University Grants Commission in 1991 and later became an autonomous Inter-University Centre. Its goal was to connect the libraries of universities, colleges, institutes of national importance, and research and development centres into a single information network.
INFLIBNET focused on the academic sector, which had been underserved by the earlier science-and-technology networks. It promoted shared cataloguing, union catalogues of books and serials, library automation software, and standardised data formats. By creating common standards, it made it possible for libraries across very different institutions to exchange records meaningfully, which is the technical foundation that resource sharing depends on.
DELNET: from a city network to a national presence
The Developing Library Network (DELNET) began life as the Delhi Library Network at the India International Centre Library in January 1988 and was registered as a society in 1992. It was initially supported by NISSAT and later received backing from the National Informatics Centre and the Ministry of Culture. DELNET’s central purpose was straightforward: promote resource sharing among member libraries.
Over time it grew well beyond Delhi, building large union catalogues and offering inter-library loan and document delivery to libraries spread across the country. Its longevity is notable in a field where many early networks did not survive, and it remains one of the most active resource-sharing networks today.
CALIBNET and the city networks
The honour of being the first library network usually goes to the Calcutta Library Network (CALIBNET), conceived in 1986 with NISSAT funding to link scientific and other libraries in the eastern region. It was soon followed by a wave of metropolitan networks: BONET in Bombay, ADINET in Ahmedabad, MALIBNET in Madras, MYLIBNET in Mysore, and PUNENET in Pune, among others, most of them established between 1992 and 1994. On the science and industry side, SIRNET was set up to interconnect CSIR laboratories and other research institutions.
These city networks shared a common pattern. Each began with email and CD-ROM services and aimed to build value-added databases such as union catalogues. Many struggled to sustain themselves once the internet made global resources directly accessible, but collectively they proved that cooperative networking could work and trained a generation of professionals in the process.
Growth of IT and the internet in library networks
The arrival of affordable computing and, crucially, the public internet in the mid-1990s transformed everything. When Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited launched India’s first publicly available internet service in 1995, the assumptions behind library networking shifted dramatically.
From union catalogues to digital consortia
In the early years, the prized output of a library network was a union catalogue: a combined list showing which library held which book or journal. The internet made a far more powerful idea possible. Instead of merely locating a physical item, libraries could now offer the full text of journals and books online. As one analysis of the shift to consortia explains, the pressure of rising subscription costs and shrinking budgets pushed institutions to buy electronic resources collectively rather than individually. Group bargaining secured better prices and wider access than any single library could manage alone.
UGC-INFONET and e-ShodhSindhu
This consortium model reached its mature form through the work of the INFLIBNET Centre. The UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium, launched by the University Grants Commission in 2004, provided electronic access to scholarly journals across universities and was especially valuable for institutions in remote areas with limited library budgets. A parallel programme, N-LIST, extended similar access to colleges, while INDEST-AICTE served technical institutions.
In December 2015 these three initiatives were merged into the e-ShodhSindhu consortium under the Ministry of Education, executed by the INFLIBNET Centre. e-ShodhSindhu provides current and archival access to thousands of peer-reviewed journals and a range of bibliographic and factual databases to universities, colleges, and centrally funded technical institutions. Combined with the N-LIST component, member colleges now reach thousands of journals and lakhs of e-books through a single window.
This is the culmination of the journey that began with dial-up email links in 1986. What started as a few institutions exchanging messages has become a national infrastructure where a research scholar in a small-town college can read a recently published international paper without leaving the library terminal. The networks were not just about technology; they were about turning the principle of resource sharing into a working national system, supported by government funding and held together by common standards.
What do you think? Now that most scholarly material is accessed digitally through consortia, do city-based and regional library networks still have a meaningful role to play, or has their original purpose been fully absorbed by national platforms? And how should the next phase of networking respond to challenges like open access and the rising cost of e-resources?
Leave a Reply