Online Library Management System for University of Colombo Students Council Lounge Library

Abstract

The students Council Library is a small scale library that is been used by many students in the Faculty of Science, University of Colombo. It is managed by the students of Faculty of science. Since the manual system is being used, lot of paperwork has to be maintained by coordinators and the librarian for daily transactions such as loaning books, borrowing books and member registration etc. It has become inefficient and effort consuming due to the increase in memberships and a large volume of titles. Therefore the need of a computerized system is emerging, to reduce the time and energy wasted in maintaining the library while reducing the workload of the librarian and coordinators. The proposed system will address most of the manual work carried out by coordinators and the librarian in daily tasks and further it will generate very useful reports to take decisions for success of the library in the coming years. The system will also automate some processes such as fine calculation and help in maintaining the library, by keeping record of books, keeping track of books borrowed by the members. The system will also aid in book acquisition by finding out the most borrowed books and generating reports accordingly. Rational Unified Process (RUP) model was chosen to develop the system among the development methodologies. PHP (Hypertext Pre Processor), a powerful server side scripting language is used for the system development. And Mysql server is used for data storage and manipulation process. Further JQuery, html and JavaScript were used for other transactions such as validation and data sending. The Apache web server is used in client server architecture. In addition, ArgoUML software and draw.io web tool was used to draw the UML diagrams such as use case diagram, class diagram and activity diagram in design process, in this dissertation. At the end of this development process, the system was tested by the librarian and the coordinators in the library. Therefore the client was satisfied with the outcome of the system. The online library management system has been designed to fulfill the difficulties face with the manual system. So the computerized system will facilitate to increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the library.