OSS Library Management Solutions?

spectre_240sx asks: "I work for a growing educational institution in need of a good database for its library. We're fairly small at the moment, and the cost of some of a decent commercial solution just isn't realistic in our situation. We'd rather spend that money on more books and better equipment for our labs. I'm sure I could come up with a usable database myself, but it would lack the refinement of a mature project and it would also be quite troublesome for me to find the time as I'm the only IT person at the school. Does anyone know of an open source solution that might suit our needs? 99% of the computers here are Mac OS X machines, and using X11 is a possibility, though a native (or web based) app would be preferable."

Comments

Not Free, but might help

[Tibor the Hun]

The program we use is Innovative Millenium. While it is not free, it does run natively on OS X clients. It is Java Based and seems to work well.
We've just had the 15th anniversary of the system, so it has been a good decision for us, by not having to change databases as the collection grew.

Koha

[isn't my name]

I've heard lots of good things about Koha. I do not run library systems. I have never used Koha, but I have come across more than one article on it.

Their first FAQ item:

What is Koha*?/What can Koha do?

Koha is intended to be:

• a library catalogue front end/OPAC
• a library system intranet
• a circulation tracking system
• an acquisitions/budgeting system

You might also check out oss4lib

Re:Koha

[jonadab]

When I was researching this for our library, Koha is the only open-source thing I found (and, I think there was also a fork of Koha, the name of which I forget, but it did not seem to be any better than Koha from what I could determine).

Unfortunately, I also had to conclude that Koha is really not ready for real use. I looked at its capabilities, and it is really not anywhere near the same ballpark, in terms of functionality, let alone polish, as the various proprietary solutions that are available.

We ended up going with GIS/Polaris, mainly because their quote came in some fifteen thousand smackers lower than the next lowest quote. (This may have had something to do with their status as our current vendor, since until now we have been using their Galaxy system, which is pretty solid but now really starting to show its age. If GIS were not our current vendor, their quote may have been more comparable to the others.) In some ways I wanted to go with another solution, but with the Director and Clerk Treasurer spending hours every week fretting about the possibility that the rumors of budget cuts *might* pan out, the larger pricetag was really not palatable.

But as far as Koha, I was not able to justify even mentioning it to my boss; I looked at it, and it just plain wouldn't do a lot of what we really needed; to a great extent, it would actually have been a step *down* from Galaxy, in terms of functionality (though, of course, getting the data into a relational database, as all modern systems do, is a pretty big win; Galaxy was developed in the era when it went without saying that the data would of course be stored in an undocumented custom binary format; but *any* modern system would get us away from that; Polaris uses MS SQL Server. We'll obviously have to stick it in its own subnet and isolate it from everything with a firewall, and I would have preferred Postgres or Oracle, but hey, there's a DBD module for it, so I'll be able to write a Class::DBI wrapper, and that's a *huge* improvement over a proprietary binary format.

Re:Koha

[phoenix_rizzen]

The fork you speak of is OPALS-NA, which adds a *much* nicer user interface to Koha. There's also a newer version known as zOPALS that uses z39.50 servers/protocol for most import, search, and export duties. zOPALS also handles union catalogues across sites.

We've been testing OPALS-NA at 6 sites (4 elementary schools, 1 secondary school, and 1 central library cataloguing site) for the past year. We've also been testing zOPALS for the past three months or so. Everyone is very impressed with it so far.

OPALS-NA/zOPALS isn't free, and it's not fully open-source (you get the source and can play with it however you like, but you aren't allowed to share it with anyone).

And it's Canadian, written/managed by Bibliofiche in Montreal, Quebec. :) Can't get much better than that. :)

They've added links and integration with their CERF product, which link search results to relevant (and human checked) websites, and Knowledge Suite product, which is an online course outline, teaching plan creation/sharing site.

Dspace.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dspace.org/

"A groundbreaking digital repository system, DSpace captures, stores, indexes, preserves and redistributes an organization's research material in digital formats."

http://helium.knownspace.org/whyknownspace.html

"KnownSpace is a data manager---something that can help users build, organize, reorganize, annotate, search, mine, visualize, and navigate large, heterogeneous, dynamic data spaces. The aim is to provide a uniform platform for researchers around the world to develop and disseminate software to provide better interfaces, more intelligent applications, and more sophisticated and uniform networking---all for free, with source code easily changeable and available to anyone."

A possible front-end.

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/index.html

huh ?

[Anonymous Coward]

How bout :
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=library&section= pro jects&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

there are plenty available including
1. Library Manager
A library automation program. Author: Volkan YAZICI
No screenshot
[Development Status] 3 - Alpha
[Environment] Web Environment
[Intended Audience] End Users/Desktop
[License] OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System] OS Independent
[Programming Language] PHP, SQL
[Topic] Database :: Front-Ends

Added: 10-Mar-2002
Updated: 06-May-2002
Rating: 8.44/10.00
Vitality: 0.00%
Popularity: 0.19%
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Version:
RELEVANCE: 3.73
2. OpenBiblio
A library automation system. Author: Dave Stevens

[Development Status] 4 - Beta
[Environment] Web Environment
[Intended Audience] End Users/Desktop
[License] OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System] Microsoft :: Windows :: Windows 95/98/ME, POSIX :: Linux, Unix
[Programming Language] PHP
[Topic] Education

Delicious Library-Digital Repositories.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.fedora.info/

"
Fedora is a general purpose repository service developed jointly by The University of Virginia Library and Cornell University. The Fedora project is devoted to the goal of providing open-source repository software that can serve as the foundation for many types of information management systems.

The software demonstrates how distributed digital information management can be deployed using web-based technologies, including XML and web services."

http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/papers/aDORe_20050 128_submission.pdf

"aDORe: a modular, standards-based Digital Object Repository ..."

Re:Delicious Library

[babbage]

Agreed. Delicious Library is a fantastic application that should be able to do a wonderful job with this. Out of the box, it already has support for some of the things that a real, physical, lending library would need:

• It maintains a list of assets (books, movies, albums, video games), and will look up as much information about each asset as possible from Amazon's site
• Inputting data is fairly easy if you have an iSight camera or their Bluetooth scanner. Once the bard code has been read, everything else happens automatically.
• It automatically generates a list of borrowers from your user account's address book, and will allow you to keep track of who is borrowing which asset; likewise, you can look up what assets each borrower is currently holding, including when they borrowed it.
• Most of the interesting data exists as XML files under ~/Library/Application Support/Delicious Library, so if the application itself doesn't do what you need, you can hack the XML source to do what you want. For example, if you want to provide a web front end for people, it would be fairly easy to hack up a script that uses XSLT to translate the DL XML data into an HTML site.

Etc.

Plus, it's a young application from a young company, made by what seems to be a tight & enthusiastic team of people. I bet they'd be deliriously happy to find out that an actual library wanted to use their application -- if you contact them about what you want to do, they might even be able to get features you need into future versions of the software.

It's not open source, but it's damned good software. Give it a try and you may find that it's just what you need to get started...

Koha, plus...

[Cryptonom]

You definitely want Koha (www.koha.org). For Koha support, and special flavors: LibLime (www.liblime.com) and for even more library goodness, Keystone (http://www.indexdata.dk/keystone/).

Ask the Whitebox Linux folks (a library)

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Start here:

http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/

This is a build of RedHat's EL by a public library system in Louisiana. They run servers and at least 50 workstations off this. I don't know if their LMS is ISS or not, but it's worth asking.

The library's site is:

http://library.beau.org/

anbd includes link to online research and an online catalog. (The online catalog is unavailable as I type this).

OSS4lib, Koha, etc.

[Noksagt]

I am a developer involved with refbase. I say that not to plug the product (it is a bit minimalist for a real library, but there are many individuals, research groups and departments who use it to host papers), but so you know where I'm coming from. I have interacted with the open source bibliographic community & have tried many products & keep an ear to many others.

First, check out the oss4lib blog and openbib. These will point you to a lot of other good material.

Next, absolutely download , which is one of the most full-featured & comprehensive library solution that the F/OSS community currently has.

I personally thing cheshire deserves a shout out too. A clean, FAST python-backed online catalogue with cross-site searching & conforming to a lot of nice standards like MODS.

You should also keep an eye for developments from bibliophile. This is a collaboration between many players of F/OSS literature databases.

Koha on Linux or BSD

[SgtChaireBourne]

I've used Koha and know people using and testing it.
I've also used expensive systems like Notis, Aleph, Voyager, plus about four other major systems. I've also had the misfortune to be able to poke around the internals of some of those. None are good, though some have more drawbacks than others. Some that I haven't named are good others are really terrible.

Koha is rather good. It is better than the commercial systems in some areas and still lacking in some others. What it's mainly missing is a high-pressure sales team and a budget for whiskey & golf trips to soften people for signing .

Koha runs on any *nix or BSD, such as Debian GNU/Linux, OS X or even QNX. The software installation and configuration is easy. It's in Perl and uses MySQL and Apache. The customization of the interface and policies, though will take some time. The system requirements are not heavy and a library with a small user load can get by with a PII.

I have heard and seen good things about the OPAC, cataloging interface and the circulation modules. The cataloging is more flexible than most of the bigger name library systems, especially when it comes to non-roman alphabets. The acquisitions system is not familiar to me.

Except for the fact that it's far more flexible and customizable than the big name systems, it isabout as far along (or behind) as the others.