Minisis is a computer-based information management system which addresses the needs of organizations that have a requirement to manage bibliographic and text-intensive collections of information. In the 1970's, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada developed MINISIS as part of its development programme in information sciences. Since then, Minisis has been used by institutions of varying size and has found a spread of use in areas such as inventories, student records, legislative records, press clippings, etc. MINISIS originally operated on the Hewlett-Packard 3000 family of minicomputers. The platform has now been broadened from Hewlett-Packard to include DOS or Windows based microcomputers in both stand-alone and LAN environments as well as a Unix environment. The MINISIS suite of products combines to form a dynamic tool-kit which can aid an organization in satisfying their information management requirements. The growing suite of products at present include the MINISIS Database engine, the SMA, WWW Interface and STEMMA — a versatile thesaurus management application.

MINISIS in India

In 1989, IDRC set up a MINISIS Resource Centre at SNDT Women's University to disseminate MINISIS in India. The University Library through its Information Centre has been a user of MINISIS since 1987. SNDT University Library conducts MINISIS training, organizes user group meetings and provides a variety of support services to local MINISIS user community.

As part of the Centre's activities, the Windows version of MINISIS was formally launched in India at the Seventh CDS-ISIS User Group Meet at Bhubaneshwar during 26-28 November 1997. Mr. Bill Swift from IDRC's product development team presented a number of features of the system including multi-media handling capabilities. He also demonstrated the WWW interface, STEMMA and other applications such as the Library and Museum Management System to India CDS-ISIS user community.

Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, and Dr. M.A. Varghese exchanging the MOU [Photograph]

A New Partnership

To extend the outreach to a greater number of potential users and to bring awareness about the capabilities offered by MINISIS, SNDT Women's University and NISSAT have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly carry out the work of training and distribution of MINISIS in India. The MOU was signed by the Vice-Chancellor, SNDT Women's Universiy, Dr. M.A. Varghese and the Secretary to Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, on the occasion of the University's forty-seventh annual convocation on December 23, 1997.