This relatively small project involved the whole development cycle, from needs analysis and application design, through several rounds of user testing to installation, training and support.
In essence it is a bespoke content management system, but there was a particular emphasis on making data input as easy and intuitive as possible as this was to be carried out by volunteers rather than trained library staff.
The major reason for a bespoke design was the problem of classification. Many of the books had never been catalogued and some of the older and antiquarian volumes could not be classified using the Dewey Decimal system. Nevertheless, some form of categorisation was required, even though a book could be a member of several categories.
The other particularly interesting feature was the search function. One of the major objectives of the Friends' project was for the books to be used once people were aware of what was available. However, there were relatively few books for a library and the probabilities of an exact title, or works by a specific author, being on the shelves was very low. Rather than return no results, it was decided that a 'fuzzy' search, which returned results likely to be of interest, would be much more helpful to the end user.
