The people in the institute are actively working towards providing better facilities to the students and the research community. Please read on to see the various plans those are afoot in that direction.

Dr. A. K. Aggarwal of the Mechanical Dept.
and
Dr. Om Prakash of the Cermamics Dept.

Write:

In the first phase towards library automation, we are trying to provide electronic access to various journals. The reason being that budget for our IT library is too less, it is not sufficient enough to have journals in the form of hard copy purchased for each academic discipline. Added to that, the hard copies of the journals have to be accommodated within the library premises. That means more space needs to be created and more manpower is to be employed to handle the increasing number of books. Addition of space requires funds and UGC is giving funds only for purchase of books & journals. On the manpower front, situation is otherwise. The number is coming down each year due to retirement of staff. BHU is not willing to fill up the vacant positions. So by having electronic access to journals we will not have these kinds of problems and for the same money we will have access to 10-15 times more number of journals. This would hopefully help to improve research facilities for which we are better scored even compared to some of the IITs. Towards this end, some progress has already been made. ISDN line has come to IT main library. Additional computers will come within a week from now. Seeing the progress and the flux of students, we may go for more number of computers.

In the second phase, on which we will start working shortly, probably within a week or so, we would like to automate the issue, return and enquiry system. For this purpose, including the systems for creating the database of books and journals, we would need about six systems and a server. We also plan to modify the existing layout related to the front desk and wish to have it air-conditioned to create a space where people would like to come, sit and study. Needless to mention that such an automation will require bar-coding of books, creation of database, etc.

We would like the alumni to come forward and suggest anything that can make the library more useful and meaningful.

We are happy to note that some of the alumni are interested in helping us out. Please let us know to what extent you can help and in what possible manner would you would like to extend the help

Review and Post Comments (7)

Analysis done by : Mr. Vivek Pandey - EEE 98

Legend
Y - feature is available
N - feature is not available
X - feature is available but does not meet the requirements properly

Feature	OpenBiblio	MyLibrary	Koha
Book keeping	Y	Y	Y
Assign book to user	Y	Y	Y
Renew book for a user	X	Y	Y
Track/Manage overdue/fine	Y	Y	Y
Order tracking (new / re-supply)	N	N	N
Generate order request letter	N	N	N
Book Update	Y	Y	Y
Student Update	Y	Y	Y
Linking Book Db and Order Db (i.e.. any book ordered and delivered will be automatically be added to book Db)	Y	Y	Y
Report Generation	Y	X	X
Search	Y	X	Y
Book Location Map	X	X	X
Custom User Class (there can be different types of users - Teachers and Students which have different properties like number of books etc. )	N	N	N
Custom Book Class (the library could have different type of books in case if IT-Library it would be general books and TBB books )	N	N	N
Generation of NO DUE certificates	N	N	N
Search on various parameters	Y	Y	Y
User account status information	X	Y	X
Management of user profile	X	X	Y
Call  Number	Y	Y	N

Comments of the evaluator

Open Biblio

• Only limited search facility available.
• This software has the capability to support various categories of books ( like TBB )
• Open Biblio supports due date and late fee feature.
• It has following reports available.
  • Balance due
  • Bibliography checkout list
  • Hold request - containing member's contact information
  • Label printing query (used by labels)
  • Over due list
  • Most popular bibliographies
• GUI needs lots of improvement.

My Library

• Very poor GUI
• Poor book database.
• Poor student database.
• It has a separate interface of reference books.
• The report generation facility is not very good.
• This software has a very good search mechanism.

Koha

• It has good Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) support.
• Book procurement is linked to the book database.
• Report generation features are very poor.
• To make it functional code level changes would be required.
• Koha has facility to add book categories.
• The work flow in some parts of the application is much better than other softwares being evaluated.

Review and Post Comments (139)

Various softwares are being evaluated for LAP. There are three open source softwares under consideration and a couple of commercial ones. The links to the Open Source softwares are provided here. We are sorry that we cannot provide the list of the commercial softwares being evaluated.

Open Source Software being evaluated

• Koha


• MyLibrary


• OpenBiblio

The criterion of evaluation are listed below. The software should be able to handle at least the functionalities listed here. The list is not comprehensive but gives the volunteers evaluating the softwares a minimum bar to adhere to. Please let us know if more things need to be added to this list.

• Interface for the Librarian
  • Book Keeping:
    • Assign book to user
    • Renew book to user
    • Track/Manage overdue/fine
  • Account:
    • Order tracking(new/resupply)
    • Generate order request letter
• Maintenance :
  • Software should be stable (i.e. it should require near zero amount of maintenance hassel)
  • If the software is Open Source Software it should be in active state (ie. some people should be really working on it )
• Database:
  • Book update
  • Student update
  • Linking book DB and Order db (i.e. Any book ordered and delivered will be automatically updated into book DB)
• Misc:
  • Report generation
  • Search
  • Book location map
  • Custom user class (e.g. there can be two use classes student and teacher with different default values of max. books allowed, book period etc.)
  • Generation of NO DUE certificate
  • Custom book class(e.g TBB, Normal...)
• Public Inerface:
  • Search: Search on various parameters
  • Account:
    • User should be able to view his/her account status(i.e. books issued, overdue, fine etc.)
    • User should be able to manage his account/profile
  • Interface for user to suggest
  • Procurement of new book (it should be reflected to the librarian)
• Usage
  • Integrated barcode scanning support
  • Integrated barcode printing support
  • Import mechanism to handle existing database.
  • Option to generate library cards to be used by the members

Review and Post Comments (1)