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Keywords
Document supply, France
Abstract
The Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (INIST) is a service unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). A leading integrated scientific and technical information center, INIST provides the major public research and academic institutions as well as the socio-economic sector with resources and services designed to improve dissemination of and access to international scientific and technical information. Committed to the new information and communication technologies, INIST offers a whole range of access services to scientific and technical information on the Internet. The article highlights the place and the future of document supply in this context.
Introduction
Created in 1988 by merging the two documentation centres of the National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) (STM and Social Sciences & Humanities), the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (INIST) launched in France the concept of the "virtual library": documents are no longer consultable in situ but are accessible only via databases and specialized information services on the Internet, which are better adapted to the selective dissemination of information (for a critical history of scientific information in France and CNRS see Astruc et al. (1997)).
The "young institution" described by Lupovici (1991) as a "new player in the information world" has grown up. At the age of 15, INIST has confirmed its place in the French and European market of scientific and technology information. With holdings and databases among the most significant in Europe, INIST employs more than 300 information professionals, data processing specialists, technicians and engineers, who manage the daily flow of data, from collection to diffusion of information.
At the heart of this process, the analysis and indexing of publications carried out by specialized teams of "documentation engineers" allow the input of the two databases launched in the middle of the 1970s by CNRS: PASCAL, for science, technologies and medicine (STM), and FRANCIS, for the social sciences, arts and humanities (together 17 million records). Multilingual and multidisciplinary, they constitute an alternative and a complement to other large databases and remain a substantial tool for the validation of French and European research. They are present on the principal international hosts and can be accessed through the CNRS portal, ConnectSciences (http://connectsciences.inist.fr).
Organization and structure of the institute...