Contributions of prof. P N Kaula to Indian Library science professional journalism: An analysis of papers in ‘Herald of library science’ [1969–2006] abstracted in LISA

Herald of Library Science occupies an important position among library science journals published from India. The present study is based on the coverage in LISA (Library and Information Science abstracts) of papers published in the years 1969 to 2006. A total of 867 abstracts were retrieved from LISA for Herald; LISA volumes were manually scanned to get the number of papers published in each volume, number of authors in a paper, Indian and international authorship, leading authors, categories of papers like articles, book reviews, biographies, and conference reports, page length of papers, and subject areas of papers. The subject categorization was further extended to assess the number of papers on different types of libraries, institutions or personalities or countries or states or a scheme or product, or library/information topics. The paper also includes an analysis of a particular issue of the journal to stress on the diversity of content included in Herald. The paper also calls for providing an institutional backing to the journal along with application of IT tools for further augmenting the utility of the journal, like provision for e-submission of manuscripts, web access of contents pages and free full text web delivery of the journal for wider dissemination of its professionally rich contents to the target clientele.