Express News Service By

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kerala Index Online, a web portal of the Kerala University Library, will be launched here on Wednesday. Thomas Isaac MLA will launch the Kerala Index Online at a function to be held at the University Library at 2.30 pm. Malayalam University Vice-Chancellor K Jayakumar will deliver the keynote address.

University Librarian E Hashim said the Index would be a depository of articles by researchers, journalists and writers published in the past 30 years. Also it will contain articles published about the writers and journalists.

The first issue of Kerala Index was published in 1986. which was a retrospective index. Covering articles appeared in journals of 1984 and 1985.

It was during the tenure of Thomas Isaac as Finance Minister that Library got an assistance worth Rs 5 lakh to design a software to digitise Kerala Index. K H Hussein, former librarian of KFRI, Peechi, has designed and developed the software.

The online version of Kerala Index is availble in the Internet from January 2013 in the URL http:// www.keralaindex.org. Now the Index availbel both in print and online versions.

The online version in Malayalam Unicode fonts is with 60,000 records from popular magazines, dailies and weeklies from 1984 to 2014, in a MYSQL database. Publication details of the articles along with its page numbers are provided in the index.