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

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

OpenBiblio

[Micah Stetson]

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/