[jmarte]

Ok, I have a problem that I am hoping that someone can help me with. We have a volunteer run children's library at our church. Orginally they found some windows Library management software that they felt would work for them. After previewing it and attenmpting to set it up for them, I realized that this was a difficult, expensive, and awkward to use program and was overkill for what they needed. I recommended Delicious Library and they went with it. By the way, we got the wireless scanner and it is cool and fun to use, especially after scanning using iSight. Coolness factor of 10!!! Anyways, they just came back and said they wanted to go back to the bloatware as they did't feel Delicious library had the features they were looking for. Here is what they said,

"As I've gotten into it, I realize Delicious Library is really only for someone's personal library so they can track to whom they've loaned books. There are also several things ---- wants to be able to do that it can't, such as - print out a list of books (can be exported but it's not easy to read) or a list of what books have been checked out, overdue books, etc.

I read the manual for the other program and felt comfortable with it but I did not try it. The reasons we did not keep it before... we weren't sure if it was more than what we needed, it seemed like alot of money, and I really had no idea what they would want the computer program to do at the time. We also weren't sure how user friendly it was - it seemed to me to be more "DOS based" rather than "Windows based" if that makes sense. However, we've decided that we would not have patrons check out their own books so the only people that need to be able to use it are a few volunteers so that's less critical. I've also talked with a few children's librarians - one church and one school and they paid $1500 and $2500 for their program. From what I've seen they all are up there in price.



Here's what I see as our needs.

To be able to scan UPC's to enter the books and have the book information pulled off the Internet.

Print UPC's for duplicate books and books that don't have a working UPC.

Track books and users.

Be able to look up whether a book is available or whether it's checked out.

Be able to print a list of overdue books and patron information.

Would like to be able to send an email for overdue books to those patrons from the program.

Needs to be user friendly enough that volunteers would be able to check-out books using a scanner and typing in the patron's name/library number.

Would like to be able to type in the word "sheep" (for example) and have it list books we have which have to do with sheep. Or, books dealing with blended families.

Would like to be able to get books suggestions - such as if someone had read Alice in Wonderland, what other books might they like. Delicious Library sort of does that.

Anyways, I feel that Delicious Library can already do most of what they are looking for, and I want to know if Delicious Library 2 is going to have more features that can help me sway them back to Delicious Library. Also, do you have a ballpark guestimate as to when it will be released? If Delicious Library 2 can meet most of there needs I can probably push back if it is going to be release soon.

Sorry for the long post, but after using DL I have become pretty passionate about it. It is simple yet powerful and easy to use!!!!

thanks in advance for your input!!!

[Delicious Monster]

I guess the easiest thing to do would be to take this point by point.

To be able to scan UPC's to enter the books and have the book information pulled off the Internet.

Delicious Library has this pretty well covered.

Print UPC's for duplicate books and books that don't have a working UPC.

Delicious Library does not print barcodes, but there are plenty of free barcode printing programs out there and, once you have a barcode, you can enter the number into Delicious Library such that scanning it will jump to the book, just like books with commercial barcodes.

Track books and users.

This is exactly what Delicious Library does. I'm not entirely sure why they think Delicious Library doesn't track loans and borrowers. Certainly it's not optimized for dealing with hundreds of borrowers, but that doesn't make it unusable for that purpose.

Be able to look up whether a book is available or whether it's checked out.

This is also something Delicious Library already does. You can see that a book is checked out from any shelf, or see which books a borrower has from that borrower.

Be able to print a list of overdue books and patron information.

This will get easier in Delicious Library 2, but it's certainly possible now. For an example of what I mean, check out my post on using AppleScript to generate a list of titles.

Would like to be able to send an email for overdue books to those patrons from the program.

I assume they mean they'd like this to happen automatically, because you can pretty well do this now. Sure, the default text is a recommendation, but nothing prevents you from editing the email to say "hey deadbeat, return my book." You could also use AppleScript for this.

Needs to be user friendly enough that volunteers would be able to check-out books using a scanner and typing in the patron's name/library number.

So, yeah, you can't scan to jump to a person's record, though you can select the borrower's list then type that person's name to jump to them, just like with any other list. This is that whole "not optimized to deal with hundreds of borrower's thing.

Would like to be able to type in the word "sheep" (for example) and have it list books we have which have to do with sheep. Or, books dealing with blended families.

Yep, we do this, both in the program, and with Spotlight.

Would like to be able to get books suggestions - such as if someone had read Alice in Wonderland, what other books might they like. Delicious Library sort of does that.

We sort of do that like the pope is sort of religious.

So, to sum up, Delicious Library 2 will improve some of this stuff, but I suspect with a little bit of effort (and maybe a bit more exploration) you could accomplish all this in the current version.

If you have any specific yucks I might be able to give you more detailed suggestions.

[jmarte]

Ahhhh, thank you so much for your response. I think that I am going to learn more about these apple scripts and try them out. I definitly think that DL will work for them. Also, I failed to mentioned that the person is not a Mac user and I sense some prejudice against the Mac http://forums.macnn.com/images/smilies/bang.gif