SIES Library Catalog
Prepared by
1. Introduction: -
SIES Library Catalog is a free book catalog application with an intuitive interface, available for use with Android devices. This app lets you check details of all the books available in GST library, get details about it and also read a sample of it from Google books.
The app and api is free and open source, which means anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared (here) so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software, under the GPL license. The student can scroll to have a look at all the available books, or can enter details manually to search for a particular book (or list of books) with any one of the significant features. He / She can maintain a personal list of favourites to view them offline on the go. The app also provides a share feature which allows the user to share those books with others. One can read a limited preview of the book if its copyrighted or even the full book if it is in public domain.
2. Need of the project :-
The main purpose of this application is to save the time spent by the students in the library searching for quality books, by providing them with a list of available books on their mobile device. This is an attempt to encourage students to check out the latest available books on a particular topic, as students refrain from visiting the library and spending some time looking at the available options as we are living in a busy environment. It will also save the students money as they can find out if the library has the book, rather than buying a new one. Students can see if a book satisfies their needs by checking out its contents using the preview feature. Sharing of books is a very important feature that we introduced as it brings liveliness to the product and doesn’t restrict the app to a sole device.
3. Basic Features :-
● Read books
Books can be read/previewed depending on the copyright status.
● Searching
Books can be searched by Title,Author,Publisher and ISBN
● Sorting
The results of search can be sorted according to date or quantity
● Pagination
The results of the search are paginated. Which gives more optimized results and also infinite scrolling on home page
● Sharing
Sharing of books is a very important feature which allows for sharing your favourites which makes this app social friendly.
● Favourite
Favourites act as a bookmark so you can save the books locally, responsible for faster, offline access.
4. Technology Used :-
Based on the powerful open-source UI software development kit, Flutter, SIES Library Catalog is written in Dart, which in
itself is a fast, object-oriented programming language.
Flutter provides its own widgets, drawn with its own high-performance rendering engine.
Flutter is a cross-platform UI toolkit which enables us to make web/android/iOS/desktop with the same codebase, allowing us to
make the app more accessible with less effort.
The data is provided by the API barathlibrary.herokuapp.com, which is based on Node, and uses Express, Mongoose, Mongodb and
Heroku. This is a vital part of the app. It is also open source (source code available here).
The raw data we received from the Library was a spreadsheet, which needed a lot of refactoring and cleanup. We achieved this by
writing a csv parser in C++ and developing efficient algorithms. The code for this is available here (though not directly
related to the project, we think, it was a major step to make a performance efficient app). We were able to remove around
20,000 redundant entries (80% data).
5. Architecture :-
6. Results :-
● HOME PAGE
● READ BOOKS
● SEARCH
● BOOK DETAILS
● SHARING
● SORTING
● FAVOURITES
7. Conclusion :-
The SIES library catalog is a very user-friendly application which would surely help students to explore our library in a different, easily accessible and inexhaustible manner. I hope you enjoy this app as much as we enjoyed coding it.