In a bid to provide a sophisticated environment to the scientists for their chosen area of research, the Information Division of National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune, is planning to set up a Digital Information Resource Centre. The new project is part of the Laboratory's idea todeploying various tools of information technologies for the upgradation of research infrastructure within the lab and also for the country.
The Information Division of NCL contributes to the Lab's success as a leader in R&D by bringing together information, knowledge, tools and systems for informed decision making for research and management. "Towards this goal, the Division has taken several strategic and timely initiatives in the field of information and communication technology,'' pointed out Dr. S.Krishnan, Head, Information Division, NCL.
The investment in the project is estimated to be around Rs.1.5 crore. "We plan to spend around one crore over the next one year on computers and networking devices,'' said Krishnan. The basic purpose is to leverage IT to help the laboratory to maintain its leadership position as a premier R&D laboratory, he added.
Presently, NCL has a campus wide local area network with about 500 computers, a range of servers and a good connectivity to the Internet. The laboratory also provides an access to a range of digital resources including databases like chemical abstracts, current contents, and chemical business newsbase on the Intranet and online access to a large number of electronic journals. Its collection includes around 1.3 lakh books and 250 journals. And to add more to the present infrastructure, the upcoming Digital Information Resource Centre will provide a user room with a range of computers for easy and common access to digital information resources, productivity and other office tools, compute resources, visualization and modeling facility and access to special device like scanners, CD writers etc. The centre would also house state- of- the- art classroom facility with PCs or workstations on each desk for human resource development and capacity building training. There would be a server room with high performance servers managing centralized ICT services and information resources and a computer laboratory is also planned to set up experimental systems and test evaluation platforms, software and applications.
Commenting on the contribution of the Information Division in the Indian pharma industry, Krishnan said, "We are building up expertise in the area of Chemoinformatics. This includes expertise in building up chemical structure and reaction databases, virtual molecule generation etc. which are becoming increasingly relevant for the pharma industry as they venture into new drug discovery program.'' Recently, theInformation Division has developed two portals for Chemoinformatics viz. ChemVista.org and ChemVista.net.