Summary
The Library Utilization Monitoring System is a Capstone Project of BSIT students who graduated in the year 2014 and it was implemented in the campus library of ISU San Mateo so that the manual writing of daily attendance in the logbooks upon entering and leaving the library will no longer be used by its clienteles. With this, tallying of attendance of library users will be easily done by inputting only the range dates, attendance of users by course and year will be done easily for the monthly, quarterly, semi-annually and annually report of the librarian.
Background and Problem
Library Utilization in ISU San Mateo is not automated. Students must sign in the logbook. With this, Librarian encountered problems on the manual operations such as: librarian needs to logbook every book that borrowed in the library; it is a burden for the librarian to count the number of books borrowed every month just to do monthly report; additional work for the librarian to monitor the students utilizing the library resources; and it consumes too much time in searching of books if it is loaned out or in the shelves of the library. Handling many students and faculty in the library is a problem, especially to monitor the attendance every time they utilize the library. However, the faculty and students have encountered challenges in the automation of library utilization such as lack of budgets, inadequate ICT facilities, low skills levels of clienteles, lack of commitment by institutional management, and reluctance among clienteles to use ICT.
Solution and Impact
The BSIT 4th year students developed a Library Utilization Monitoring System to automate the time-in and time-out of the students in the library. However, to complete the automation in the Library, the IT faculty of the campus gathered information about the problems encountered in the manual operation of borrowing books and utilizing the library. The IT faculty came up with an idea to develop an Automated Library Utilization Services to fully automate all the transactions in the library of San Mateo campus. He developed the Automated System using Visual Basic 6.0 and MS Access 2003. After the development of the System, he pilot-tested the system for 6 months/1 semester if there are still problems to be developed. After a semester, it was fully implemented in the library in 2014. Additionally, with all the credits received by the Library of San Mateo Campus, it will now be extended to University of La Salette High School.
Milestones
Using the Enhanced Library Monitoring Utilization System and Resources Utilization System, International Standard Organization (ISO) and Commission on Higher Education Region (02) commended and gave positive aspect to the campus library, with this, key officials of the campus are planning to extend the system to the other campuses after it will be copyrighted.