Book library management system - know a good one?

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Published Tuesday, September 14, 2004 10:36 AM by RoyOsherove
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Comments

Tuesday, September 14, 2004 7:16 AM by Corey

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

How many employees/books do you have? I know it sounds pretty arcane :), but we actually set up a small book/video library with checkout cards. Works pretty well.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 7:51 AM by Oleg Koudinsky

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

I have the same problem.
3.5 GB of book, all formats (pdf,chm), some times i have ISBN and picture.
I don't know what can with all this materials.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 8:07 AM by David Brabant

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

Hi Roy,
If I assume that your team works based on confidence (and the contrary would be very surprising), then why don't you use an Excel sheet on a shared drive? You probably don't have so many books and so many employees that you need a real database to handle all of them. Of course, this requires a little discipline. But you need that as a developer, anyway ;-). Several other tracks: a simple web service combined with an InfoPath form (nice little application that I would be very happy to develop just to learn new stuff :-); or FlexWiki with a topic for each book; or .Text with a feed for each book :-); ...
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 8:50 AM by Mike Killey

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

Not sure if it can work as a shared database or not, but I use Book Collector (http://www.collectorz.com) to keep track of all my personal books, as it allows you to define who has which books lent out and so on. It's not free (like most good software), but it is cheap.
It does have the facility to export book details to XML, which (AFAIK) includes the details on who has which book out. Couple this with a nice XSLT, and you have a web-based record of where all your books are.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 9:08 AM by Eric Smith

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

I know this is not *my* company, but... As a demonstration of what SharePoint is capable of, as a consultant, I created a simple book library management system using a custom list in SharePoint. Because there is no limit to the number of views that can be created against a list in SharePoint, and since security is flexible, I was able to create a means of allowing users to see at a glance which books were1 available, which were checked out, to click on a given book to create a reservation for it to be picked up at a later time, etc... Since this was just an example, I was not around long enough to see how it has worked over time... However, I do think that SharePoint could serve this purpose. Not free of course, but if your company already has Windows 2003 licenses, then it is included...
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 11:52 AM by Eric

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

I'm sure this isn't what you want to hear, but if checkout & categorization are the basic requirements, I would think you could build one quickly in Smalltalk hooked to a simple db.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 2:07 PM by Omer van Kloeten

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

At the time we had a big-assed Excel document on a shared folder. :P
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 7:35 PM by Kent

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

Why don't you go to IKEA and buy a bookshelf. Then put a sheet of paper on the side or top of the bookshelf.

When someone takes a book out, they write the book title and their name down beside the book title.

When they return the book, they cross the entry out. :)
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 10:22 PM by secretGeek

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

cut each page out of each book and use them to wallpaper the corridors.

that way everyone can browse and you'll never lose any.

maybe i haven't thought this through completely.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004 4:57 PM by TrackBack

# Excellect Ideal -- Book Collector

Wednesday, September 15, 2004 11:58 PM by Polo Lee

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

Maybe you need Wiki.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004 9:39 AM by Greg

# re: Book library management system - know a good one?

I've dabbled a bit in the open-source library systems. I would recommend looking at http://www.oss4lib.org/ for some general information.

The easiest LMS that I've found is phpmylibrary. It is open-source and is pretty easy to set up and use. Go to www.phpmylibrary.org to find out more information.

If you want to see an example of phpmylibrary, you can visit an OPAC I set up a year or two ago: http://opac.amigoshouston.org

Good luck!!