Library Software - Good or bad?

[reggiep]

The Librarian asked me for my opinion on micro library or any other library software.

I didn't have one but wondered if anyone in edugeek land did?

 

Can anyone recommend anything to look at or avoid like the plague?

 

Thanks

Edited June 5, 2008 by reggiep

[elsiegee40]

What level are you looking for? Primary? Secondary?

[reggiep]

Sorry, secondary.

[GAS]

At our secondary school we use Micro Librarian Systems V 8.5.2 so far no problem and working fine.

[sparkeh]

Micro Librarian has gone down well at a couple of schools. I am not really involved with at both librarians run it but gets good reports.

[teejay]

My wife is a school librarian and has used loads of different systems. She finds Alice is by far the best.

[penfold_99]

we had alice but we're now moving to oliver.

[SYNACK]

We use access-it at a couple of my sites, primary schools but their is a facility for LDAP (AD) integration so that it can pull borrower names right off your AD server - never used this though.

 

It has fantastic support but their is a subscription fee for this, we had a corrupted database fixed and sent back within two hours.

 

Access-It Library Software

[Michael]

I look after Micro Librarian in several schools. It's easy to use and very robust. Support is very good too, but more importantly, it is network friendly.

[imiddleton25]

AccessIT is excellent support is top notch have met the developer a couple of times when hes been over from New Zealand and he is realy keen on providing the support and back up required.

[dhicks]

Can anyone recommend anything to look at or avoid like the plaugue?

 

We're planning on trying out Koha - an open source, web-based system. I've set up a VM with it installed on, but that's as far as we've got so far. The librarian is going to give it a go when he gets a bit of time.

 

Anyone else out there using Koha?

 

--

David Hicks

[flyinghaggis]

we had alice but we're now moving to oliver.

 

We've recently moved from Alice to Oliver and my personal opinion is that it's rubbish. Alice generally worked without any trouble but Oliver seems to be full of bugs and half the modules properly don't work either. Despite being promised by the sales staff it would it also doesn't interface with our active directory structure nor does it automacally link into our MIS system either.

Really disappointed with it given how long it's been in development/producion for. It's basically just a web-interface with a database running at the back end so it should have been realatively easy for them to setup aswell given they already had the basics of the system (Alice) in place already. It feels like an unfinished beta product and all the support staff I spoke to were useless 1st line script monkeys. I've still to speak to a dev despite asking on several occassions

[Michael]

For your reference, Micro Librarian does link into your MIS system. I believe there's a tool you can now buy that does it automatically, or alternatively you can manually run a report in Sims for example, which exports the information to a file. You can then import this directly into Micro Librarian.

[superfletch]

Micro Librarian (Junior Librarian 3) I've used in several schools (all primaries though), as people have stated it seems to be an excellent product.

 

It is easy to install and configure, minimum hasstle with importing users (CSV file with name, class, yr, and a unique identifier) is easy and updates are simple.

 

It is Vanilla, CC3 and Viglen network friendly and diagnosing faults is pretty easy too.

 

Don't know how it would cope with heavier use of a secondary, but if it was a dedicated PC with it's own DB in a library solely, or maybe even with just a couple of clients I'd suggest it is a great piece of software.

[AndyD]

Another thumbs up for Junior Librarian 3. Been using it just over a year, previously using an older version until I persuaded the school to upgrade!

 

Very user friendly and importing pupils through a CSV file created from Integris works great with no hassles.

[limbo]

Oliver here, and Alice before that.

 

Our librarian knows what she is talking about and says this is the best of the systems on offer.

 

There is a new version just around the corner too that is SQL based which will be handy for integrating with our MLE..