NATURE AND TYPES OF SOFTARE PACKAGES:

Software packages are commercially supplied products which typically provide solutions to a particular range of software development or applications problems. Since they are developed for commercial sale in a competitive market for use by a variety of customers, a great amount of skill and effort is put into their development. Therefore, they are reliable, easy to use and in many instances, well documented. Ready-made 'Packaged' software is now becoming available for an increasing range of applications such as Office Automation Systems and Library Automation and Information Retrieval Operations. In this Unit, we shall restrict our discussion to software packages limited to library automation and information retrieval functions. 

Library and. Information personnel are primarily concerned with software packages for text or information retrieval. In addition to special purpose retrieval packages, there are also a number of general purpose packages which offer some information retrieval functions. The different types of software can be identified as: (i). basic software, (ii) word processing software, (iii) database management systems (DBMS), (iv) text-retrieval packages, (v) software associated with online lea retrieval systems, and (vi) inhouse library keeping.