Book Library System

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1

Hi everyone.

I’ve been using Grist for some time now, and I have several documents that are in use, both for me personally and for the church and also the school I work at.

At the school we’re using the self-hosted version because the demand is bigger in terms of the size of the documents, and it’s being very good and accepted by the teachers. There are more and more different scenarios where we can apply this wonderful tool.

My question is: Could we set up a library system with Grist? I’m pretty sure the answer is yes. And I have a few ideas in mind, but I’d like to open up a brain storm, to look for best practices, things to consider, etc. I think a lot of small school libraries could really benefit from this application.

At the moment, our school library uses an archaic system that doesn’t run on Windows 10 onwards. If anyone remembers WinXP applications, that’s how you see this program (which is nothing more than a database with various forms).

I’ve been looking at some open source systems, so as not to reinvent the wheel, such as Koha and Folio, but they’re not exactly what we need. They’re both excellent programs, but a little overkill. Koha is complicated to install and manage, and there are too many functions that we’ll never need. It’s designed to be used with several libraries, and we just want to organize our own (mainly searching for books). Folio seems to be more along the lines of what we want , but there’s no real production-ready version yet, it’s under development.

The features we would need at first are:

  • The main book data (obviously)
  • Author data
  • Categories, classification and tags
  • A search system

Non-essential but interesting features:

  • Enter the ISBN number and Grist fills in the book data (more or less like Zotero does)
  • Book and loan system, with return dates and automatic calculation of fines. (circulation)
  • Manage users and permissions
  • Bibligraphic citation (a calculated field with concatenaded information)

I’m open to new ideas and features, and, what would the best aproach for the task be? Or maybe somebody already has something similar developed?

Thank you in advance.

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2

Hi Paul,
Have you made any progress on your library catalog project?

Glenn

3

Hi Glenn,

A little bit of progress yes, but I had to put this to the side for a while, because I am the sole IT manager at a school with 350 stdudents, and I did restructure the whole network on the vacations. So there ist still some issues here and there.

But I plan to get back to this Library system in the next month.

I’ll share my progress here, thanks for asking

4

all of the features seem easy to implement. The most difficult would probably be the ISBN data being pulled to Grist. Would probably have to use Zapier for integrating that.

5

Or, perhaps if there is some public API for getting book info via its ISBN, then you could use the user code concept to have a function that makes the API call to get the details. To avoid CORS issues, it may have to go through a “proxy” on the same domain as where Grist is running.