ABSTRACT
An Electronic Library Management System is a web-based application for assisting a librarian in managing a book library for any learning Institution. In many institutions of learning in Nigeria, library management has become a problem due to the continued use of manually supported systems. Most higher institution of learning in Nigeria lack an electronic library management system to properly manage their literatures and relies on a manual catalogue system for managing its books and other literatures, this process is tedious and time consuming. This is seen when students queue for a long time to borrow books from a librarian who has to register each student and the book borrowed manually, hence wasting a lot of time. In many cases these books are never returned due to lack of proper tracking system by the library hence loses of valuable books and other academic materials that are very important to library users. An Electronic library was designed and developed to address the problems faced by Universities and higher institutions of learning. The system provides basic set of features to add/update members (these could be students or lectures/teachers), add/update books, or modify and delete system and also monitor other activities within the system like definition of book categories in the system, tracking of members who have not returned the books past due dates, archiving of old or stolen books for the sake of record keeping, categorization of books by status. I.e. new, old, stolen, damaged books etc. On the other hand, the librarian has the responsibilities of managing members, issuing books and keeping track of what’s in the inventory and manage check in specifications for the systems based on the client’s statement of need. The system was developed using PHP for the server-side script, MySQL 5.3 for the database and Html for front end interface. Other tools that were used were: JavaScript, JQuery library, Cascading Style Sheets, database running on Xamp Server, Bootstrap, Microsoft Office 2007, Adobe Dreamweaver CS6, and Adobe Photoshop CS4.It’s easy and flexible to use and easy to maintain and can be rolled out to other learning institutions. Its development includes the establishment and maintenance of back-end database and front-end application development aspects. For the former require the establishment of data consistency and integrity of the strong data security and good libraries. As for the latter requires the application fully functional, easy to use and so on. The system’s performance met user’s requirements.
