Posted by justingeeslin on April 21, 2011 at 6:22pm
Hi All,
What modules can you recommend for allowing the checking out of books on a library site?
Is there an obvious answer for this?
Thanks.
Hi All,
What modules can you recommend for allowing the checking out of books on a library site?
Is there an obvious answer for this?
Thanks.
Comments
ILS
This function generally falls under the umbrella of Integrated Library Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_library_system
You might investigate some of the following
http://drupal.org/project/millennium
http://drupal.org/project/sopac
http://drupal.org/project/xc
There's been other threads in this group on the subject http://groups.drupal.org/node/40772
Thanks for some places to
Thanks for some places to start. I'll give these a look.
I'm more resistant to take a module called 'The Library Module' when I can accomplish the same featrues with CCK + Flags + Views and the like.
I'll keep looking.
I guess no one is using Drupal to make a real book catalog with the checking out of books, managing users, book fines, and things like that.
All the modules I've seen are about integrating with some other catalog system.
Thanks for your help.
http://drupal.org/project/mer
http://drupal.org/project/merci was designed for equipment lending, but can be used to manage the reservations and checking/out of anything. MERCI handles late fee calculation and grouping books into "buckets" of like books for reservations/wait listing. This helps streamline the workflow so users aren't waiting for copy #5 of Grapes of Wrath while copies #1 and #2 sit on a shelf.
MERCI is more focused on letting users make their own reservations and controlling which groups can reserve which content types for what duration. It would take a fair amount of UI and View work to get MERCI to work well for a small library, but because MERCI doesn't leverage another catalog system, it has a lot of the features you are looking for. Everything from printing your own barcoded labels (http://drupal.org/project/merci_barcode_labels) to managing concurrent and monthly/weekly quotas (http://drupal.org/project/merci_quota).
If you only have a few hundred items you are lending, MERCI would work. Once you get into thousands of items, you should probably be looking at the modules @c4rl recommended.
Is there a FOSS ILS?
We're a nonprofit in Vilcabamba, Loja, Ecuador running the only library in town. It's small but busy, about 6000 books and a couple hundred members so far. We're currently using Drupal with a LETS sharing system from Community Forge to handle book checkout. We have no catalog yet, but would like to get one up. See AyudenseTodos.org for the current setup.
Does anyone know of a free ILS, or FOSS for some part of one? The commercial ILS offerings are waaaay out of reach... Thanks for any help!
foss ils
Koha
http://www.koha.org/
Evergreen
http://open-ils.org/