Project On Library Management

St. Joseph College Of Engineering and Technology (SJCET) located in eastern highlands of Tanzania, in the town of Dar es Salaam. The College operates in “Brigitta Campus” situated at about 23 km from Dar es Salaam-Morogoro Road at Mbezi-Luguruni Area. Built on a sprawling 30-acre hilly land, the college provides a conducive atmosphere for the pursuit of education. The focus of the college is on bringing out IT professionals, thus provides fine ambience for its training minds.

The College runs two programmes, Degree and Diploma in Computer Applications that started in the year 2004, and in 2005 they opened another campus in town of Songea, southern of Tanzania.

Currently, The College has been using a manual processing of library system. It has a well-stocked library providing a strong support to the Teaching-Learning process. The stack room has a total of about 32, 000 Books covering all the programmes offered. Adequate numbers of technology journals and magazines are subscribed in all the branches of study. With ample seating capacity the reading hall of the library caters to the scheduled use of the library by every class for one hour every week and to the leisure-time patronage by all the staff and students. The library working hours are between 8 am and 6pm on all working days and between 8am and 1pm on Saturday and Sunday.

As time goes by, the population of students continues to increase. The librarians are not able to update the book files and student files, are unable to keep tracks of items, organize and maintain files as the result of an increased number of redundant and inaccurate information and no security measures taken.

The college administration has now decided to automate manual Library System into a new Library Management System that will integrate among all of its campuses in order to eliminate redundancy and inconsistency of data. Librarians will be able to add/edit or delete details from and to the database plus maintaining security of Library System.

Aim

The aim of the project is to design and implement database for library management system that deals with Member registration, Item Management, Borrowing and Search for item(s) or for member(s), as well as avoiding redundancy errors and inconsistency of data by setting security measures. All records about book’s information and member’s information and other materials etc will be kept in the database.

First, the library management system will allow members to register; registration includes storing basic information of members such as Member ID, Name, Address, Email, phone number, title, and registration date.

then only the registered members will be allowed to borrow an item from the system and do searching for items based on author name, book title etc.

Item Management is about managing all items available in library including Books, Journals and Reference materials with following properties: item number, name, author, number of copy etc. Placing reservation allows member to book an item if it is not immediately available. The item might be in another campus or a member may already have it out on loan. When the title is available, the librarian will activate the reservation and keep it aside for a member who has booked.

Borrowing activity includes the following: allowing a member to borrow a book from library and be able to return a book to the library according to specific return date.

When members borrow the book, database will store the book Id and member Id and this Ids will be used to search all items that have been borrowed by specific member and know total numbers of borrowed books and returned books.

Objectives

The main objectives of the project are:

To do research on Library Systems and to establish distinct features that can be applied in developing a Library Management System.

Activities: do research on manual and online Library System; get some ideas from books and journals for relevant articles.

Deliverables: research report.

To create a WBS for Library Management System.

Activities: identify main Tasks (Activities) for the project and produce Work Breakdown Structure.

Deliverables: Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

To understand technologies to be used in designing Library Management System

Activities: briefly explanation of software(s) to be used, hardware(s), languages and server(s).

Deliverables: requirements Analysis.

To design and implement a database that will hold information for Library Management System.

Activities: Analyse information collected and draw up a requirements specification for Member registration, Item Management and setting security.

Deliverables: conceptual data model, relational schema, codes for database.

To develop a web based application for Library Management System.

Activities: the following is the platform showing how the web based application will be implemented: – PHP, CSS, XHTML, Apache and MySQL are languages to be used for developing web pages, virtual platforms and server side for validation on retrieving and accessing information from database through web based application.

Deliverables: web based application, screen dumps, and codes for web based application.

Resources

During the course of this project the resources expected to be used are:

Research: Academic Articles, Text books such Database Design and Implementation, e-Commerce; these textbooks will be used to bring up different concepts that will assist in designing a Database and Web pages for a new Library Management System then linking Web pages with the database designed.

Internet access: should be reliable because many materials are available online on different websites/blogs that talk about Library Management System.

Software: any database & web design software will be used in designing Library Management System and languages to used are: mySQL codes, PHP, etc.

Application programs: mySQL server, Ms Project, Dreamweaver, etc

Initial References

St. Joseph College Of Engineering and Technology (SJCET) PROSPECTUS 2006-2007.

Proposal: Guidelines and Samples, available at: http://sampleproposal.net/category/system-proposal/

Database Design and Implementation Coursework, Comp 1302, Due: 07-04-2010.

Library Management System, available at: http://www.dotnetspider.com/projects/7-Library-Management-System.aspx

New York State Library, available at: http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/libdev/pos/

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. It is sometimes conflated with program management.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honouring the preconceived project constraints.

[Wikipedia.org (date: 23rd Aug 2010)]

Typical constraints are scope, time and budget; used to represent the concept that the various factors affecting project outcome are coupled such that a decrease along one dimension necessarily results in an increase in at least one of the dimensions.

Scope – includes all factors associated with the project deliverables, including quality.

Budget – includes all things that cost money, including resources and equipment.

Time – is about knowing the project schedule; how much time taken to complete the project.

[Wikipedia.org (date: 23rd Aug 2010)]

Processes

The major processes include: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling and closing.

Initiation

The initiation processes determine the nature and scope of the project. If this stage is not performed well, it is unlikely that the project will be successful in meeting the business’ needs. The key project controls needed here are an understanding of the business environment and making sure that all necessary controls are incorporated into the project. Any deficiencies should be reported and a recommendation should be made to fix them.

The initiation stage should include a plan that encompasses the following areas:

Analyzing the business needs/requirements in measurable goals

Reviewing of the current operations

Financial analysis of the costs and benefits including a budget

Stakeholder analysis, including users, and support personnel for the project

Project charter including costs, tasks, deliverables, and schedule

[Wikipedia.org (date: 23rd Aug 2010)]

Planning and design

After the initiation stage, the project is planned to an appropriate level of the detail. The main purpose is to plan time, cost and resources adequately to estimate the work needed and to effectively manage risk during project execution. As with the initiation process group, a failure to adequately plan greatly reduces the project’s chances of successfully accomplishing its goals.

Project planning generally consists of

Determine how to plan (e.g. by level of detail or rolling wave);

Developing the scope statement;

Selecting the planning team;

Identifying deliverables and creating the work breakdown structure;

Identifying the activities needed to complete those deliverables and networking the activities in their logical sequence;

Estimating the resource requirements for the activities;

Estimating time and cost for activities;

Developing the schedule;

Developing the budget;

Risk planning;

Gaining formal approval to begin work;

[Wikipedia.org (date: 23rd Aug 2010)]

Executing

Execution process involves coordinating people and resources as well as integrating and performing the activities of the project in accordance with the project management plan. The deliverables are produced as outputs from the processes performed as defined in the project management plan.

[Wikipedia.org (date: 23rd Aug 2010)]

Monitoring and Controlling

Monitoring and controlling consists of those processes performed to observe project execution so that potential problems can be identified in a timely manner and corrective action can be taken, when necessary to control the execution of the project. The key benefit is that project performance is observed and measured regularly to identify variances from the project management plan.

Monitoring and controlling includes:

Measuring the ongoing project activities (where we are);

Monitoring the project variable (cost, effort, scope etc) against the project management plan and the project performance baseline (where we should be)

Identify corrective actions to address issues and risks properly (how can we get on track again)

Influencing the factors that could circumvent integrates changes controls so only approved changes are implemented

In multi-phase projects, the monitoring and controlling process also provides feedback between project phases, in order to implement corrective or preventive actions to bring the project into compliance with the project management plan. Project Maintenance is an ongoing process, and it includes:

Continuing support of end users

Correction of errors

Updates of the software overtime

[Wikipedia.org (date: 23rd Aug 2010)]

Closing

Closing includes the formal acceptance of the project and the ending thereof. Administrative activities include the archiving of the files and documenting lessons learned.

This phase consists of:

Project close: finalize all activities across all of the process groups to formally close the project or a project phase

Contract closure: complete and settle each contract (including the resolution of any open items) and close each contract applicable to the project or project phase

[Wikipedia.org (date: 23rd Aug 2010)]

Work Breakdown Structure

Work breakdown structure (WBS) is a deliverable-oriented grouping of the work involved in a project that defines the total scope of the project. Because most projects involve many people and many different deliverables, it is important to organize and divide the work into logical parts based on how the work will be performed. The WBS is a foundation document in project management because it provides the basis for planning and managing project schedules, costs, resources and changes.

Gantt chart

Gantt chart is a standard format of displaying project schedule information by listing project activities and their corresponding start and finish dates in a calendar format.

[Schwalbe, K (2007); page 25]

Gantt chart for SJCET Library Management System