Open Source Library Card-Catalog Apps?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 22, 2000 @08:39AM from the and-make-half-price-books-use-it,-too! dept.

dmd writes: "Does there exist Open Source software for maintaining a small to medium sized library card-catalog? It seems all the tools are available: a perl module for working with MARC records, several for working with Z39.50 and XML, and even a web site apparently devoted to nearly this exact topic. An actual, working, catalog, however, seems to be missing. Is this something that would be valuable? I, for one, have nearly 5k volumes in my collection, and they're begging for some discipline." I'm sure cash-strapped public libraries and schools would like to be able to use free / Free tools for this, since paper books aren't going away anytime soon. Not to mention for CDs, videos, charts, museum holdings ... any ideas out there? Turnkey solutions?

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Yes, there is: Koha. by vaxer · 2000-08-22 04:02 · Score: 5

The Koha Open Source Library System might be useful to you.
Public libraries, unfortunately, are too often dependent on fiercely proprietary-minded vendors for their daily operations.
Incidentally, the "go get MySQL, you dumbass" posters are missing an important point: libraries use the MARC data standard for catalog records, and SQL doesn't cope well with the kind of tricks MARC can do.