AUTOMATED LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SOLUTION FOR ARTHUR C. CLARKE INSTITUTE LIBRARY, KATUBEDDA, SRI LANKA.

Abstract

The Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies (ACCIMT) is one of a prominent library located near the University of Moratuwa. Library facilities are available for university students and for the general public. The library consists of many books and other research materials. These resources have grown tremendously with vast new learning materials. Although the institute used computer software to handle business process, it was lacked functions specific to a library, so the librarian couldn t use in its full potential for their day to day work load. It was very difficult to find out whether a particular item is in the library or not, and hard to check membership details or valid membership, took so much time to find late submissions of borrowed items, there were much error-prone in the calculations due to usage of non-compatible and non-user friendly software. Therefore they realized that their previously used computer system has become inefficient and time consuming due to usage of inappropriate software and increasing number of members and resources. To get rid of these difficulties, ALMS was introduced. It aids librarian to do tasks quickly in a more reliable, user friendly way. Such as quick searching for item titles, keeping track of items borrowed by the members, finding physical locations of items, maintain member and membership details. It also supports management decision making by generating useful reports. It was decided to create standalone software solution to speedup software functions and make more reliable and quicker interaction to the user. The development of the software solution was done by using open source languages and technologies such as Java language, MySQL database server, Jasper Reports. It also developed according to the object oriented principals and MVC architecture so it can be easily adapted for future modifications. Software testing procedures were organized such as unit testing; integration testing, white box testing and user acceptance testing to make sure ALMS is more reliable to the user. Online user evaluation survey was conducted to gather user feedbacks of the system after successful implementation.