WEB BASED LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR KOTAHENA PUBLIC LIBRARY

Abstract

Abstract “Public libraries are institutions at the heart of every community. They are storehouses of knowledge” [1]. Kotahena public library is quite helpful institution to the students and most of the people around the Kotahena area. But at present all the library functions are handled manually. With the current manual process which is in place in the library, it is difficult task for librarian to maintain records of ever growing membership details and the large volumes of book which are available in the library. And It is very time consuming for the members to search for a particular book in the library. So, we propose a computerized system which would save lots of time and resources of both librarian and the members of library. The proposed web-based system will aid in all the library processes such as loan process, return process, user registration and renewals, library catalogue maintenance, fine calculation and overdue report generation which are currently carried out manually in the library. Online reservation process for the members also can be incorporated in the new system. Rational unified process (R.U.P) framework which is an iterative development process has been chosen to develop the proposed web-based library management system. Technologies such as PHP (server-side scripting language), apache (web server) and MYSQL (database) are used in the development of the system. WampServer has been used as the web development platform. Adobe Dreamweaver has been used for the creation of the web pages. At the end of this project, the developed the web-based library management system was handed over to the Kotahena Branch Public Library and it was tested by the users in the library. End users were happy with the outcome of the project as the developed system will help them in their daily routines and remove all the unnecessary manual work.