IT Based Tool For School Library Information Management

Abstract

Kotahena Central College is a national school of Western Province, Sri Lanka that listed in “1AB” grade. It is identified as one of the schools which were developed among the 1000 national school development program.The school library has more than 5000 titles in different categories. The librarian and assistant librarian used to carry out all the library related activities manually. And also it was difficult to manage their day to day activities as it consumes much time. The major problem occurs when the librarian has to produce a monthly as well as an annual financial report for the year-end audit. Therefore, to continue the auditing processes, the library needs to be closed for almost one month which may cause inconvenience to the school children and staff.The key objective of designing and developing the IT based tool for Library Information Management was to reduce the effort of the time consuming activities and to increase the accuracy of library activities carried out by the library staff. Also this solution enables other staff members to reserve books, get the SMS reminders about the reservation as well as monitor lending status of students in classes. Furthermore it makes it easy to generate financial reports, audit reports and summaries for different access levels.The tool has been designed as a web based application so that staff members could access it through the computer labs in the school. It uses PHP, MySQL database for implement the functionalities and HTML5, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap framework for the front-end development. Gammu smsd, 3rd party tool use to send the SMS notification by integrating with this library information and management system.The tool has gone through the testing phase including user acceptance testing. Moreover these testing part used positive and negative test scenarios for ensure functionalities working exact. User evaluation questionnaire helps to confirm that proposed system achieved anticipated benefit through this tool.