Library management software can be used in unexpected ways. It allows organisations to store, organise, and access their stuff and information quickly and easily. The correct cataloguing system saves time monitoring items, boosts worker productivity, and simplifies information access. In this blog post, we’ll look at five creative ways to use library management systems to manage things like samples and pattern books, create an efficient search tool, and more. Read on to learn more about these creative ways to make the most of your library management software.
Often, people think of books when they hear the word “library,” and they think that library management software is only used in traditional libraries. With a library management system, you can catalogue your toys, games, teaching aids, samples, fabric pattern books, manufacturers’ samples and more by renaming the catalogue fields. The “Publisher” field label could be changed to “Manufacturer” or “Brand”, and the “Author” field label to “Creator”.
All it takes is a little creativity with field names. Why bother cataloguing everything? With a catalogue in place, all employees know where to find everything and how many items or copies there are. Staff benefit from being able to find the things they need more quickly and without much hassle. In addition, your catalogue could be used as an inventory for insurance valuations.
You may track items borrowed from home using the library management system’s circulation or loans feature. The library management software will assign a number to every single physical item in your library or collection and you can use barcode labels to attach this number to each item. This way, you’ll be able to track where it’s going and who is taking it out of the library or office. Regardless of whether you are lending stuff to staff, teachers, students, clients or partners, the borrowers just need to be listed in the system and can be imported. The loans module will also help you recall borrowed items by sending out an automated recall and overdue loan notices to borrowers by email.
When assessing the loans module of library management software be aware that they can be quite simple or very sophisticated. Loans policies are business rules which control things like how many items a person can borrow, for how long, and how many times they can renew their loan. Think about whether you need different policies for different groups of things and people and whether you need reservations, recalls and fines. This will determine whether you need simple or complex loan policies.
Reports are another consideration. Loan reports are vital for understanding usage patterns. Not only can you learn what is popular, but you can also find out stuff that is never borrowed or underutilised.
Library management software can be used in unexpected ways. It allows organisations to store, organise, and access their stuff and information quickly and easily. The correct cataloguing system saves time monitoring items, boosts worker productivity, and simplifies information access. In this blog post, we’ll look at five creative ways to use library management systems to manage things like samples and pattern books, create an efficient search tool, and more. Read on to learn more about these creative ways to make the most of your library management software.
So far we have talked only about physical items, but did you know that you can catalogue your organisation’s knowledge or unpublished information using cataloguing system for libraries? In this scenario, we are talking about the useful templates, policies, guides, documents, files or any documentation which your staff use as they go about their jobs. This is your organisation’s knowledge. It could be templates, company policies, recipes, instructions on how to do tasks, handbooks, spreadsheets, leave forms, etc. Many workplaces store these documents and files on a shared drive on-premise or in the cloud in folders and subfolders. The folder structure must be understood by employees to find items, which can be challenging since departments often organise their folders differently. Again, as with physical items, when you create a searchable catalogue of knowledge, all employees know where to find everything they need to do their tasks no matter how it is organised in your network.
Too often in my career, I have seen well-intentioned content creators list things, publications, files and documents on a complex maze of pages on their intranet or website. They are trying to help people find stuff, which is great, but sometimes they will list the same item on more than one page so the user can it in more than one place. This is adding to the workload of the content creator. Now imagine, an item, publication or document needs to be withdrawn or updated. The content creator now has to find every instance and remove or update it. How inefficient is that?
While, the poor user has to navigate menus, sub-menus, and pages within pages and generally needs to understand the mindset of the creator to find things. It takes a lot of clicking, perseverance and too much time when it could be more efficient. So in fact, this is no more helpful than network folders.
This is where library cataloguing system can truly help by providing an efficient search tool within your intranet or website. Having created your catalogue of things, information or knowledge, the user can simply type a word or phrase and the search tool will provide search results. When a user uses a good search tool, they will be able to narrow down their search results easily and quickly. This is a much better way for users to find the stuff they need. And from the content creator’s perspective, it’s more efficient too. They only need to update one catalogue record for users to find the item even if they search in different ways.
So finally, we bring it all together. Too often a library, the library staff and the library management system are seen as luxury overheads, tolerated when the going is good and cut when budgets get tighter. I encourage you to think about this differently and think about the return on investment of a good library management system. With library management software, you can keep track of physical items in your organization, reducing waste and loss while increasing productivity. Increased productivity results because users do not have to wade through hundreds of search results, they can quickly focus on a handful of highly relevant documents. This reduces or eliminates knowledge bottlenecks and blind spots in your organisation and allows less experienced staff to navigate with confidence to the correct information for them to complete tasks competently.
By utilising the library cataloguing system and making it part of your organisation’s wider information and knowledge management strategies, you can reap the advantages of better organisational agility, improved decision-making and problem-solving, a faster rate of innovation, supported employee growth and development, sharing of specialist expertise, improved communication and better business processes. In short, you can save time tracking items and improve worker productivity by giving workers easy access to the organisation’s information and knowledge.
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