Replacement Library System

[jj99]

Just had a price from MLS to upgrade our old Eclipse system that I have had to bodge to work with a modern OS and it is a little steep.

 

Anyone got any alternative suggestions, its only a small library and I don't need all the whiz features!

[dry]

If it's Junior Librarian that you've been quoted for, bear in mind it was last updated in May 2012!

 

How they can still charge schools a steep annual fee for something that hasn't been touched by them in 4 years is beyond me. There's an open source library management system that's mentioned on here occasionally- might be worth investigating.

[AJWhite1970]

We are giving serious consideration to moving from MLS to Koha. The site up the road from us uses it and they have 25000 users over 10 sites and the librarians are very happy with it (also happens to be my old site so I know many of the people who implemented it and use it...)

 

Koha - Open Source ILS - Integrated Library System

[witch]

Sounds good - will it import records from another library system like MLS online though?

[jj99]

Its eclipse.net its a stupid price!

 

Koha looks interesting how much tweaking did you do?

[unixman_again]

I've used Koha in the past and provided you can export records in a "sensible" format (eg for your catalogue MARC and for your borrowers csv), Koha will import. YMMV - the system imported when I used it but that was 7 years ago, and they might have deleted this feature, although I doubt it.

[mrbios]

Unfortunately it seems the market is really limited in terms of library system. The only "good" one is also the most expensive, as it's designed for proper libraries and universities etc (i can't remember the name of that) the question has been asked a couple of times here, but it seems to be a case of finding the lesser of a few evils, rather than the best product.

 

I'm told Eclipse.Net is going to be going HTML5 around October.....although they've never managed to hit a deadline since being purchased by capita so make of that what you will. We recently had enough of supporting it, and stumped up the cash to move it to hosted, best thing i ever did to be honest, I'd had enough of supporting it, i paid the installation fee out of my own budget, and persuaded the bursar to give the library the extra to do the yearly fee. I would never go back, it works a lot better this way!

 

Once it goes HTML5 and we get our biometrics link setup between eclipse and our cashless catering system, it should be a pretty good system then.

Edited April 25, 2016 by mrbios

[mikeprice]

If all you want is a very basic system - no cloud based rubbish etc etc

then try this Handy Library Manager for Windows, library management software.

We have just got it and it seems to do the job fine

[Sylv3r]

We've got a cost to move our self hosted Eclipse install to the hosted version. We've had little to no problems with the existing version so I am reluctant to pay the additional cost to move it across.

[newpersn]

Heritage Cirqua here. Great support. Not really had any problems.

[psydii]

Oliver from softlink is another one, but probably has feature overkill for a small library. They have a specialised product for special/primaries too.

[dry]

We've got a cost to move our self hosted Eclipse install to the hosted version. We've had little to no problems with the existing version so I am reluctant to pay the additional cost to move it across.

We got a crazy quote for that (Junior Librarian to hosted). It really was something ridiculous like £1500 to transfer the data and then £600 a year. Again this was for something that essentially hasn't been touched by them in over 4 years.

 

The salesperson seemed genuinely shocked when I told them what I thought of that quote.

[elsiegee40]

Moved to a more appropriate forum (it was in the Pi form )