Planning a Database for a Library :: Papers

I first needed to know who I was doing it for. It was the librarian at my school Mrs Flude she wanted to keep the information where it was safe and easy to access which would make it faster for her and the students. The two main problems of the current system are: 1st problem: They have to use an index to find books, and this is slow and very inefficient. 2nd problem: They use a card index to keep all the information needed about the students and to keep track of which students have books, this method is not reliable because you can mess up or mix up the cards or lose them and it also takes a long time which leads to inefficiency. The solution to fixing these problems is creating a database; a database is a collection of information stored in a computer in a systematic way, such that a computer program can consult it to answer questions. Before I started using the computer to make my database, I made a rough copy of what I wanted my database to look like and how it would function. It was a table which I had to fill in with information about my database. I wanted my database to be reliable and fast, to make it fast I had to make it simple and easy to use. To do this I divided it into 3 sections which are: 1) Student’s database- it would have all the names of the students in the school. 2) Book’s database- this would have all the books in the library 3) Issued books database- this would show which books were borrowed and who borrowed. They have to use a card index to keep all the information needed about the students and to keep track of which students have which books. It would be a lot easier to use a database though, for several reasons, one of which a card based index can get messed up very easily.