A Library computer system is the software used to catalog, track circulation and inventory the library's assets meant for circulation. Such software is intended for the needs of the home, church, private enterprise or other small to medium sized collects. Larger, First World libraries will typically use an Integrated library system to manage the more-complex activities such as aquisition and reference interview.
This article is intended to assist the librarian of a small to medium sized collection in selecting software, much as the Comparison_of_wiki_software
Software Criteria
Distributed Sofware vs. Web Service
Library computer systems tend to fall into two offerings, Software to be purchased or a service. With Distributed Software the customer installs the applications on their own hardware and is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the application and the data whereas customers who subscribe to a service merely upload data to the vendor's remote server via the internet and pay a periodic fee to access their data.
Data entry assistance based upon ISBN
Many applications can reduce a major portion of manual data entry by populating data fields based upon the entered ISBN number using MARC standards technology via the internet.
Barcode scanning and printing
With most any software, users can eliminate some manual entry by using a barcode scanner. But some software is designed, or can be extended with an additional module, to integrate scanner functionality. While most software vendor provide some type of scanner integration, not all will print labels with barcodes.
Software Comparison Matrix
To be added here
See Also
- Library Management System for large libraries
- Integrated library system for large libraries