One hundred years of Indian LIS periodicals

Abstract

This paper briefly traces the hundred years journey of Indian LIS periodicals. In all, 186 periodicals have been found tobe published since 1912, of which 63 periodicals have ceased publication and the remaining 123 are continuing. The oldestperiodical entitled Library Miscellany was started in the year 1912 from Baroda and ceased after eight years, in 1920.Another periodical entitled Granthalaya Sarvaswamu that started in 1915 from Vijayawada is still continuing. It is abilingual periodical and publishes articles both in English and Telugu. This periodical may be reckoned as the oldest IndianLIS periodical today. A few of the periodicals are indexed in well known indexing, abstracting and bibliographic databases.It is observed that most journals were from Delhi followed by West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. Nearly eighty percentperiodicals are in English, while 17% are multilingual (English with one or more regional languages). The leading regionallanguage is Bengali followed by Marathi and Hindi. It is found that 78% periodicals appear in printed form, 10% in onlineelectronic form and 12% publications appear in both printed and electronic form. Also, 93% periodicals are found as closedaccess publication, while only 7% are open access. Among Indian LIS periodicals, 35% are (quarterly) and 31% (bi-annual).The proportion of monthly and annual periodicals is 9% each. Mushrooming of open access LIS periodicals has beenobserved since 2010. In the hundred-year period, the highest number of periodicals (35) was started in the year 2011.