Online Library Management System for FOCUS library (FOLMS)

Abstract

The library of the Fellowship Of Christian University Students (FOCUS) is located in their office in Dehiwela. It currently holds more than a thousand books at this location on various topics and in all three languages. Though FOCUS encourages its members to engage in reading books because of the lack of interest, information and complexity of searching for books, it has become a problem and a large number of books are not used to its fullest potential. The library currently has a manual log that every borrower enters their details of the book and closes the entry upon returning the book. However there is no one to track the overdue books and to remind the members to return the book to the library. The implementation of the Online Library Management System for the FOCUS library (FOLMS) will assist all its members in searching for books according to the title, author, language or classification and also check the availability of the book over the Internet. A functionality of reserving or adding books to their queue depending on its availability also exists in the system. The librarian has to approve the borrowing or returning of any book and will be able to monitor the books through the system which will help in tracking the books to its borrowers. The librarian(s) are in the process of considering the implementation of policies in order for the library to have a straight forward process, so that it can function in an organised way. The Library administrator will be able to design any management information reports and make any change to the database structure that the librarian requires. FOLMS was developed using php programming with the use of coding framework CodeIgniter and xampp to host the database and for sql manipulation. User interface customisation was done by using Firebug plugin for Mozilla Firefox browser and Netbeans and Notepad++ were used as the text editing tool in the development. The application will run as a web application and is hosted on the client s apache server and is accessible through the client s website for all registered users. The website itself is undergoing an upgrading process to better accommodate the newly envisioned services, of which FOLMS is one.