NIRMALS®: AN OVERVIEW

Library, as a vital information resource centre of an organization or community, has to be insured for and ensured with the latest information handling tools to excel in performance. The emerging information technology has brought about perceptible changes in the information storage, transmission and retrieval processes. The advent of microcomputers and massive storage media has opened the new vista for introducing the library database management system quite contrast to the traditional library resource management. 

Louis S. Venugopal
August 15, 2004 
From Director's Desk

It matters not whether it is nice or wise to say a word about NICE here, but it is must to know first the Organization before we move on to its software products in asmuch as that you could judge the fruits of a tree from its roots. Briefly speaking, NICE was established as a Freelance Software House in 1992, and incorporated as a Unit of Regina Infotech Private Limited, in 2003. The first release of the DOS version of NIRMALS (developed in Clipper language) in 1992, was reported and reviewed in almost all Computer Magazines. During the course of more than a decade, it has brought out several software products, the flagship being NIRMALSPro 2.2.0--a client/server library management package widely used in more than a hundred reputed libraries across the country. It has got a clear mission to make the libraries wake up to the clarion call from ITMessiagh.

Nirmals® has never been conceived as yet another run-of-the-mill software product for library management. Let there be no mistake about its conception. A comprehensive search tool capable of tapping the hitherto elusive or otherwise undermined library resources is what the library world has ever been striving to devise. How many software packages readily available in the Software Supermarket are measuring up to the critical mission expectation of the library world? It is still a leading topic at the professional workshops. An ideal software package cannot lose sight of the clear perspective of the transitional library world. Sophisticated software need not establish its pomp and glory with a retinue of complex operations. Such an uncanny information retrieval tool at the instance of simple operation controls would be a great boon to the library user community. I was rather obsessed, to be a bit frank, with designing and developing such productive software by bestowing it upon with “the best that has been known and thought in the world.” In the beginning I possessed such idea, and now the idea has possessed me. That’s all my personal statement about Nirmals journey from conception to concretization.

    This tutorial, and its related project, will cover the following material for Knowledge Seeker:

• How to use NIRMALSPro effectively?

• Nirmals Functional Modules

• Acquisitions Controly System

• Bibliographic Control System

• Circulation Control System

• Serials Control System

• Online Public Access Catalog

• Nirmals General Utilities

• Frequently Askable Questions

• Copyright Information