Kia ora 😊 We are replacing the software for our community library of things are looking for options. We live in a village so it would be a max of 300 accounts and probably 2000-3000 items in the inventory. I’m having a hard time finding anything open source.
I know it’s very niche so no worries if nobody knows of anything 😊
Hi! In the library I work, we use Koha, which is probably the most well-known open-source library management system. This comes with the advantage of having a big community and having a lot of answers to questions you’ll probably have, albeit the documentation is kind of all over the place. Just a heads-up, though: it only runs on Linux so, whoever is going to do the implementation must familiarize themselves with it if they haven’t done so already. It’s not a flawless system by any means but as far as open-source goes, it’s the best and most mature.
There are a few demo servers you can try on their website: https://koha-community.org/demo/
The other open-source library management system I know of is FOLIO (their repo) but I haven’t tried it or read much about it. I only know it’s way younger than Koha (created 10 years ago, I think) and that EBSCO is one of its vendors. It may use newer technology but I honestly don’t know. You can also try a demo server if you go to their wiki.
Hope it helped. If you have any questions, let me know :).
Thank you! This is great!
are there any phone apps you know of it might recommend?
No phone apps that I know of for Koha. I think it works fine on any mobile browser, though. If you know HTML, CSS, or even JavaScript you can do a ton of cool stuff on your library’s catalogue. As for FOLIO, no idea, but I don’t think any exist.
There is VideLibri but it doesn’t add any functionality you don’t already have when accessing the online catalogue of any library on your browser, so I don’t think it’s worth it. Something like the Web Opac App, which let’s you browse a ton of libraries’ catalogues in one app would be a more interesting solution. Unfortunately, it’s stopped being maintained a while ago and went closed-source, from what I can gather.
