Library Management System

Hi

I am looking for an alternative to Alice that doesn't cost the earth but gives the usual features of a library system that a school needs such as user import, cataloguing, lending, fines etc. It would be great to have a system which also has a lookup system so cataloguing books could be made easier than doing it manually, so barcode reader to look up the ISBN details etc would be great.

Oliver looks great, but so expensive. Under £1000 would be brilliant. We are only a small school so the Library isn't huge.

Any recommendations would be brilliant.

Many thanks

Ben

For Primary Schools there is Micro Librarian Systems : Junior Librarian

and from the same stable the Secondary School product is Micro Librarian Systems : Eclipse

As a school librarian on the side of my main IT job, I love Junior Librarian.


I haven't found a cheap/free version of anything that I have found satisfactory for my needs.

Way back when I implemented Junior Librarian at a Primary. It was very nice from both an IT network admin point of view and a Library setup point of view. The only bit that's a bit tedious is the barcoding and scanning process of all your books etc.

We had Alice and migrated to Oliver but after 2 years of problems plus the countless years of problems with Alice! We moved to eclipse in June of this year and the librarian loves it. We have bar coded up our camcorders and cameras and book out via eclipse as well so we can keep track of who has what!

I think we got a discount for buying 3 years but spread the payment equally over the 3 years to save money.

We used Koha at a school I was at. The librarian loved it (she wanted a change when the Alice people couldn't solve a data import problem) and the price was unbeatable. To convert from Alice to Koha, we decided to recatalogue and re-barcode every book and got a couple of students in during the holidays, paying them proper money. We allowed them 10 days and they finished in 8.

We use alice here, when I started at this school, it hadn't been managed properly and had a fair amount of problems because of this, things like students being duplicated and in incorrect classes and year groups on the system, because the previous technician failed to follow most of the basic setup guides on it, now after a year of getting to grips with everything at the school it seems to work fine for us with very little problems or maintenance required, just the usual year end maintenance needed to remove old users and set the new term holidays.

I was asked about upgrading us to Oliver, but we dont need it imo here and the librarian agreed, because we are not a massive school and do not have a particularly large library either, so it was not worth the costs for us going forward.

Alice isnt bad imo, it just needs to have the user guides followed to work well, we import the users from SIMS doing the import report and that has gone pretty much without a hitch this year (the first year that I have done the proper year end).

We use this: QuickTrack Pro Asset Tracking and Item Tracking Software Mac barcode software, PC barcode software for barcoding software and bar code scanners

It came free with the barcode reader, we networked it and the staff just love it for the SEN and reading clubs :)