I've been thinking about putting a library management system (LMS) in for IUM for some time now. If we're going to start offering a service to businesses in the community, then we need to keep a better check on the stock, and to do that, we need an electronic system. But I've no budget, so I decided to investigate some open source software, and with the help of a willing partner, known to some as Dog Byte, I started to work on moving the old library database onto the new LMS, OpenBiblio.

Other open source LMS

We also checked out Koha and myPHP. More about those later.

Tasks completed today

I created several collections on the LMS, which will eventually contain all the items currently in the library database. This also helped me to decide how to go about uploading the items, since I think that it'd be a mistake to try and import the whole database in one go.

I seperated out all the items that weren't books, that were for languages classes, reference books, and instructor's material. I was left with a set of books that makes up the core business and management collection, and from this I excluded items that didn't have an ISBN. With this spreadsheet of approximately 2300 items, I'll have to work out the MARC tags, so that the Dog can convert them into MARC records and import them into OpenBiblio.