Significance of Libraries in Academia and Beyond

Library is an important part of the academic sector as well as some professional sectors too like, Advocacy etc. The efficiency of a library lies in the fact how it is arranged and how easily one can get the books of their choice.

Generally, what we see nowadays is the manual library management system whose process of operation is very much hectic. What we are doing is that we are proposing a computerised library management system, which would provide better and efficient service to the library members.

Brief outline of the application:- 1. Purpose: – This software is meant to transform the hectic manual system to a more efficient computerised system. 2. Scope: – This application can be used efficiently in educational institutes and certain professional sectors also. 3.

Assumptions: – This application assumes that the user doesn’t possess the right to modify information about books. 4. Technology Used: – Visual Studio 6(for form designing). Presently, a manual system for managing the library is employed almost everywhere.

What exactly is done here is that the persons who like to get the benefits of the library have to fill the membership form and then they are provided with a Identity Card. Members have to bring their Identity card each time they want to borrow a book to home or they want to read the book in the library itself.

In this process each transaction are to be noted down in the specified registers and then signed by the member and the library attendant. Drawbacks of the Present System:- Some of the problems being faced in manual system are as Follows:- 1.

Get quality help now

WriterBelle

Verified

Proficient in: Computer Science

4.7 (657)

“ Really polite, and a great writer! Task done as described and better, responded to all my questions promptly too! ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Fast report generation is not possible. 2. Tracing a book is difficult. 3. Information about issue/return of the books is not properly maintained. 4. No central database can be created as information is not available in the database. The proposed system aims at transforming the manual system into a computerised one. The benefits of the computerised “Library Management System” are : – 1.

Planned approach towards working: -The working in the organization will be well planned and organized. The data will be stored properly in data stores, which will help in retrieval of information as well as its storage. 2. Accuracy: -The level of accuracy in the proposed system will be higher. All operation would be done correctly and it ensures that whatever information is coming from the centre is accurate. 3. Reliability: -The reliability of the proposed system will be high due to the above stated reasons. The reason for the increased reliability of the system is that now there would be proper storage of information. . No Redundancy: -In the proposed system utmost care would be that no information is repeated anywhere, in storage or otherwise. This would assure economic use of storage space and consistency in the data stored. 5. Immediate retrieval of information:- In manual system there are many problems to retrieve large amount of information. In this system retrieval is very fast. 6. Easy to operate: -The system should be easy to operate and should be such that it can be developed within a short period of time and fit in the limited budget of the user.

Depending on the results of the initial investigation the survey is now expanded to a more detailed feasibility study. It is a test of system proposal according to its workability, impact of the organization, ability to meet needs and effective use of the resources. It focuses on these major questions:- 1. What are the user needs and how does our system meet that? 2. What and how much resources are being needed for the proposed system? 3. What are the likely impacts of the proposed system? 4. Whether the proposed system solves the present problem? Steps in feasibility analysis:- Eight steps involved in the feasibility analysis are:- . Form a Project team and appoint a Project leader. 2. Prepare system flowcharts. 3. Enumerate potential proposed system. 4. Define and identify characteristics of the proposed system. 5. Determine and evaluate performance and cost effectiveness of the proposed system. 6. Weigh system performance. 7. Prepare the final report and present to the management. 1. Technical Feasibility:- It is the study of resource availability that may affect the ability to achieve an acceptable system. This evaluation determines whether the technology needed for the proposed system is available or not.

It decides whether the work for the project be done with current equipments and existing technology. It is thus associated with specifying equipments and software that will successfully satisfy the consumer’s requirement. The technical needs of the system may include:- Front end and back end selection:- An important issue for the development of a project is the selection of suitable front-end and back-end. When we decide to develop the project we go through an extensive study to determine the most suitable platform that suits the needs of the consumer as well as helps in development of the project.

The aspects of our study include the following factors:- Front end selection:- 1. It must have a graphical user interface that assists persons not from the computer background. 2. Scalability and Extendibility. 3. Flexibility. 4. Robustness. 5. It must be according to the customer’s requirement and culture. 6. It should have an independent platform. 7. It should be easy to debug and maintain. 8. Front end must support some possible back ends such as MS Access. Back end selection:- 1. Multiple user support 2. Efficient data handling 3. Provide inherent features for security. . Efficient data retrieval and maintenance 5. Store procedures 6. Popularity 7. Compatibility with OS 8. Easy to install 9. Various drivers must be available. 10. Easy to implant with the front end. The technical feasibility is frequently the most difficult area encountered at this stage. It is essential that the process of analysis and definition be conducted in parallel with an assessment to technical feasibility. It centres on the existing computer system (hardware, software etc. ) and to what extent it can support the proposed system. 2. Economic Feasibility:-

Economic justification is generally the “Bottom Line” consideration for most systems. Economic justification includes a broad range of concerns that includes cost benefit analysis. In this we weigh the cost and the benefits associated with the proposed system and if it suits the basic purpose of the organization i. e. profit making, the project is making to the analysis and design phase. The financial and the economic questions during the preliminary investigation are verified to estimate the following:- 1. The cost to conduct a full system investigation. 2.

The cost of hardware and the software for the application being considered. 3. The benefits in the terms of reduced cost. 4. The proposed system will give the minute information, as a result the performance is increased which in turn may be expected to provide extra economic benefits. 5. It checks whether the application can be developed with the available funds. The Library Management System does not require enormous amount of money to be developed. It can be developed economically if planned judicially. The cost of project depends on the number of man-hours required. 3. Operational Feasibility:-

It is mainly related to human organizations and political aspects. The points to be considered are:- 1. What changes will be brought with the system? 2. What organization structures will be disturbed? 3. What new skills will be required? Do the existing technicians have the skills? If not, can they be trained in due course of time? Our system is economically feasible as it is very easy for the customers to use it. They just need how to work on the windows platform. 4. Schedule Feasibility:- Time evaluation is the most important consideration in the development of project.

The time schedule required for the developed of this project is very important since more development time effect machine time, cost and cause delay in the development of other systems. A reliable Library Management System can be developed in the considerable amount of time. Before starting to design a software product, it is extremely important to understand and document the exact requirements of the customer. In the past many projects have suffered because the developers started implementing something without determining whether they were building what the customers exactly wanted.

The primary goal of the requirement analysis and specification phase is to clearly understand the customer requirements and to systematically organize the requirements into a specification document. The SRS document is the final outcome of the requirements analysis and specification phase. Generally requirement gathering consists of the following phases:- 1. Studying the existing documentation: – The analyst usually studies all existing documents regarding the system to be developed before visiting the customer site. Typically these documents pertain to issues such as the context, the basic purpose, the stakeholders, etc. . Interview: – Typically there are many different categories of users of software. All the different categories of users are interviewed to gather the different functionalities required by them. Based on the interview the document is made. 3. Task Analysis: -The users usually view software as a black box that provides a set of service. A service is also known as a task. For each identified task, the analyst tries to formulate the different steps necessary to realize the service in consultation with the users. 4. Scenario Analysis: – A task can have many scenarios of operation.

The different scenarios of a task can occur when the task is invoked under different situations. For different types of scenarios of a task, the behaviour of the system can be different. 5. Form analysis: – The different forms are analyzed to determine the data input to the system and the data that are output from the system. For the different data input to the system, how these are used by the system to produce the corresponding output data are determined from the users. Characteristics of a good SRS document: – The skill of writing a good SRS document usually comes from the experience gained from writing SRS documents for many problems.

However the analyst should be aware of the desired qualities that every good SRS document should possess. Some of the identified desired qualities of the SRS documents are the following: – 1. Concise: -The SRS document should be concise and at the same time unambiguous, consistent, and complete. Verbose and irrelevant descriptions reduce readability and also increase error possibilities. 2. Structured:- A good SRS document should be well structured which is easy to understand and modify. In practice, the SRS document undergoes several revisions to cope up with the customer requirements.

Thus it is important that it is well structured. 3. Traceable: – It should be possible to trace a specific requirement to the design elements that implement it and vice versa. Similarly, it should be possible to trace a requirement to the code segments that implement it and the test cases that test this requirement and vice versa. Traceability is important to verify the results of a phase with the previous phase, to analyze the impact of a change, etc. 4. Response to undesired events: – It should characterize acceptable responses to undesired events. These are called system response to exceptional conditions. . Verifiable: – All requirements of the system as documented in the SRS document should be verifiable. This means that it should be possible to determine whether or not requirements have been met in an implementation. Any feature of the required system that is not verifiable should be listed separately in the goals of the implementation section of the SRS document. Project Requirements:- 1. User Requirements:- Every user should be:
• Comfortable with working of a computer.
• He must have knowledge of library.
• He must also have basic knowledge of English. 2. Hardware Requirements: –

Processor: -Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV or higher RAM : -64 Mb or Higher 130 Mb 3. Software Requirements: – Operating System: -Win-98, Win-XP, Linux or any other higher version Database: -Ms Access It is clear that the physical objects from the previous section the member, books, library – correspond to entities in the entity relationship model and the operations to be done on those entities holds, checkouts, and so on – correspond to relationships. However, a good design will minimize redundancy and attempt to store all the required information in as small a space as possible.

This application can be easily implemented under various situations. We can add new features as and when we require. Reusability is possible as and when require in this application. There is flexibility in all the modules. Extensibility: – This software is extendable in ways that its original developers may not expect. The following principles enhance extensibility like hide data structure, avoid traversing multiple links or methods, avoid case statements on object type and distinguish public and private operations. Reusability: -Reusability is possible as and when require in this application.

We can update it next version. Reusable software reduces design, coding and testing cost by amortizing effort over several designs. Reducing the amount of code also simplifies understanding, which increases the likelihood that the code is correct. We follow up both types of reusability: Sharing of newly written code within a project and reuse of previously written code on new projects. Understand ability: -A method is understandable if someone other than the creator of the method can understand the code (as well as the creator after a time lapse). We use the method, which small and coherent helps to accomplish this.

Cost Effectiveness: -Its cost is under the budget and make within given time period. It is desirable to aim for a system with a minimum cost subject to the condition that it must satisfy the entire requirement. After we have completed the project we are sure the problems in the existing system would overcome. The “LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM” process is made computerized to reduce human errors and to increase the efficiency. The main focus of this project is to lessen human efforts. The maintenance of the records is made efficient, as all the records are stored in the ACCESS database, through which data can be retrieved easily.

The navigation control is provided in all the forms to navigate through the large amount of records. If the numbers of records are very large then user has to just type in the search string and user gets the results immediately. The editing is also made simpler. The user has to just type in the required field and press the update button to update the desired field. The Books and Students are given a particular unique id no. So that they can be accessed correctly and without errors. Our main aim of the project is to get the correct information about a particular student and books available in the library.

The problems, which existed in the earlier system, have been removed to a large extent. And it is expected that this project will go a long way in satisfying user’s requirements. The computerization of the Library Management will not only improves the efficiency but will also reduce human stress thereby indirectly improving human recourses Books: 1. Fundamentals of Software Engineering by Rajib Mall(PHI) 2. Black Book of Visual Basic 3. Visual Basic by Tata McGraw Hill(TMH) Web Sites: 1. www. apache. org 2. www. wikipedia. com 3. www. iisjaipur. org