My brother-in-law, who works for a small parish school in St. Louis, left a message for me yesterday and said he had a “library question” for me. Cool! I’m full of library answers, so I called him back.
The classroom-sized library at his school needs a new way to manage their collection– a new integrated library system (ILS) and he was wondering if I had any notions. The first thing that popped to mind was Library Thing (actually Shelfari was the first thing that popped to mind, but I meant Library Thing). When I first created my Library Thing account (and abandoned it shortly thereafter), there was a lot of blogtalk about the potential for using LT in a small library setting. Library Thing is all over this, by the way. They’ve got library use in their FAQ and seem to be developing Library Thing for Libraries, with widgets that you can incorporate into your existing ILS. Fun & cool!
Today I launched into some research on ILS possibilities. There’s lots of commercial sites hawking their stuff, but I wanted to check out the many blog reviews first– I knew I had seen them, but hadn’t paid too much attention since I don’t work in a small library and I’m not in any sort of position to choose systems for anyone generally. So, yay Technorati, by the way.
My brother-in-law is more tech-savvy than I am and wondered whether there were any open source options out there. My thought was “probably”. But, wow, there’s some awesome looking open source ILS out there! I sent my brother-in-law a list of my findings and he emailed me back to say that an annotated list of possibilities was totally what he was looking for and that I “should submit this as a blog article somewhere!” What a great idea!
So here’s my list:
About Library Thing: http://www.librarything.com/about
“Enter what you’re reading or your whole library—it’s an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.”
Library Thing has set themselves up to be used by organizations, including libraries. http://www.librarything.com/organizations.php
Open Source Integrated Library Systems (ILS)
Evergreen: General Public License software, free download, used by Georgia Public Library system; demo available
Avanti MicroLCS: uses Java, free download; demo currently unavailable
Emilda: GPL release; couldn’t access demo
Koha: free, open source, GPL release. The first open source ILS, seems well-developed. Live demo available from library using Koha
OpenBiblio: Available through Source forge. I couldn’t find much information apart from their own documentation
Automate, Catalog & Organize Small Libraries
A list of resources for small libraries, including open source solutions.
Resources:
“Options for Automating a Small Public Library” Connecticut State Library blog http://ct.webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=5978
“Evergreen: Your Homegrown ILS” Library Journal http://libraryjournal.com/article/CA6396354.html
“An Update on Open Source ILS” Library Technology Guides http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=9975
oh, jenn!
had i known, i would have suggested you post an article on this blog!
Hey. You’ll want to check out Scriblio, when it launches.
Tim (the LibraryThing guy)
Hey, Scriblio has officially launched! I’d take a look.
Thanks for the heads-up, Tim!