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OSS Library Management Solutions?

Posted by Cliff on from the curl-up-with-a-good-book dept.

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."

4 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Delicious Library by sachmet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Delicious Library may suit your needs until you get large enough that you need an industrial-strength solution.

  2. What Kind of Database by escowles · · Score: 1, Interesting
    It seems like a lot of people are confused by the term "library management system". There are really two categories here, depending on what kind of stuff you're organizing:

    If you're talking about books, slides, and other physical items, then you need an OPAC or something like it. Delicious Library was suggested, but I'd guess that it wouldn't scale to meet your needs. Koha looks like a better bet. I haven't tried it out yet, but it definitely looks promising. I've been surprised that there isn't a major open source OPAC/ILS, since there are a lot of libraries doing a lot of software development, while at the same time paying ridiculous yearly licensing fees to the commercial ILS vendors.

    If you're talking about managing digital images, movies, ebooks, websites, and other digital resources, then DSpace and Fedora are the two major players -- both are open source, and both seem to have a good number of users (though DSpace has the edge on that point). There's also NCState's MyLibrary, which is more of a portal system, for cataloging websites in addition to other types of resources. That could be useful for having a decent library website without having to do a lot of custom coding and database setup.

    -e

  3. Don't bother, it's not worth it by mendax · · Score: 2, Interesting

    First, I must point out my potential biases. I work as a software engineer for a particular prominent integrated library system company.

    I've recently had the need to think about open-source library systems. They appear to be cheap but you need to consider the support implications. Library software, like all software, has bugs in it and library software is particularly complicated making it hard to rigorously test. Who are you going to call when something doesn't work right? Who's going to fix the bugs you discover? Who's going to patch your software once the bug is fixed? People are very expensive.

    You say you work at a small institution. *ALL* library software contracts, regardless of company, are negotiated. Small libraries usually pay less than larger libraries for the same systems. The price negotiated in the contract is partially based upon what the vendor thinks you can afford, what it thinks other vendors you're talking to want you to pay, the kind of support you need, etc.

    When you buying library software from someone, you're not buying software, you're buying a solution, complete with help desk support, some systems administration, upgrades, and customization. It's the only way to go with this I'm afraid.

    --
    It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
  4. OpenBiblio by Micah+Stetson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    OpenBiblio might be a good fit. It's written in PHP and uses MySQL for its database engine. It was very easy to install, and I have it working on NetBSD, GNU/Linux, and several versions of Windows. Since we put it in, we've gotten a constant stream of good comments from our patrons and our library personnel -- mostly about how easy it is to use.

    Now, I should point out that I'm a developer on the OpenBiblio project, so I'm probably biased. But I think it's surprisingly good. We don't quite have the feature set that Koha has, but the code is much more approachable, if you need to modify it.

    I began using OpenBiblio because no open source library software did what the libraries I'm working for needed. It had the basic feature set, without a lot of extra fluff to get in my way. And the code was straightforward enough that I could modify it to fit my needs pretty easily. No other library system I looked at had quite the right mix. It's certainly not perfect, but we're working on it. I think it's a serious contender.

    http://obiblio.sourceforge.net/