Jude 2

I have stacks and stacks of boxes of "religious" books, and want to start a church library. I want to not only be able to easily catalog the books, but be able to allow checkout/loaning.

I have seen http://www.collectorz.com/book/ that, and at first glance seems to be perfect, especially with the bar code scanner. the problem is that it doesn't allow printing barcode labels, which for me is a must for checking out/loaning books - specifically for those that are older than barcodes.

though maybe I am assuming too much and some other library software has that taken care of somehow.

anyone? any suggestions?

We've got one - but we opted for 3 x 5 index cards &
a recipe box. We wanted folks to be able to check
books out on their own without a librarian to assist.
This way they feel free to browse before & after
church and don't feel obligated to get someone to
come and assist them.

We've got an instruction sheet posted by the door.
They pull the card out of the back of the book - sign
& date it and leave it in a box. We also have a return
box where they place the books when they come back.
We catalog all our books in a spreadsheet as they are added
to our library. Every week or two our "librarian" matches
the pulled cards up with the returned books & files them again.

Works fairly well - but we've got a small church & somewhat
small library.

Pianoman wrote:We've got one - but we opted for 3 x 5 index cards &
a recipe box. We wanted folks to be able to check
books out on their own without a librarian to assist.
This way they feel free to browse before & after
church and don't feel obligated to get someone to
come and assist them.

We've got an instruction sheet posted by the door.
They pull the card out of the back of the book - sign
& date it and leave it in a box. We also have a return
box where they place the books when they come back.
We catalog all our books in a spreadsheet as they are added
to our library. Every week or two our "librarian" matches
the pulled cards up with the returned books & files them again.

Works fairly well - but we've got a small church & somewhat
small library.

our church is pretty small as well, and my library is comparatively small as well. however, the automation I desire has to do with self checking in and out of books as well. barcodes allow this. I will provide the computer and bar code reader. I want to catalog books and put a small label on it so that the barcode can be easily scanned for checking in and out on an automated kiosk-system (I can build the automation, but need the app to be pretty full-featured).

Not sure what all you are wanting, but there are some links to free software for barcode lables if that's all you need.

http://www.idautomation.com/labelsoftware/download.html

Rambo, you can purchase barcode fonts that can be used in about any program. Your system would be just storing the numbers anyway.

I haven't worked with off the shelf library systems for something that size, but most databases can take input from a barcode reader, and you should be able to print the barcode labels from the same system as long as you have the fonts.

I've written a few things like this myself, and it's not too bad, we've played with the bar code readers and could easily add them, but for our needs it just wasn't as practical, so we dropped the readers, but as we were testing them, it all was pretty simple.