Information Systems (Database Assignment) - Essay Example

Each book has a paper card which maintains the record of which member bought which book and when. When a member borrows a book, Mr. Russell marks the entry on the card and also writes this in his notebook. He then keeps the card with himself to remind him of the pending books. There is also another notebook which maintains information about the contact details of all the members of the library. Initially, when the number of members used to be less, the existing system ran smoothly and had no flaws.

However, as the number of members and the daily transactions increase, there are a few serious problems that Mr. Russell is facing. They are described below: There are no proper records for the books in the shelves. Often members complain that they do not have the facility to search for a particular book, or at least know, whether it is available or has been issued. The situation wastes a lot of time and people have to wait a long time. It takes a while to find out which members have not returned their books back within the due date.

Members need to be reminded to return their books on time and any members who continuously fail to return books on time, need to be penalized. With the current system, there is no means to find this out. In this project, we have analyzed a problem at a local library called Reader’s Inn which is currently running on manual system. It is difficult to search through manual records and many of the functionality needed such as report generation are not possible. Hence, we developed the design for a database system for the library which consisted of three normalized entities.

Each of these entities had several attributes. These entities were programmed in Ms Access 2007, a common database package. Apart from the database tables, we also designed input screens for data and reports for output. With this database system, the existing problems will be solved to a great extent and the new