Today, there was a meeting with the teacher responsible for school books at Realschule Boltenheide. Shortly before the beginning of the holidays, a request for a new library management software reached us. We decided to include it in the BiscuIT school information system.

Development of the first version of this app, called Exlibris, is split into two parts: First, we wanted to enable the responsible teacher to enter all the books and related data into the system. Second, borrowing books to students and teachers and views for everyone to see their associated books, which will be finished for the start of the next term.

Today, all legacy school books used by the school have been added. The BiscuIT Exlibris app provides a two-step wizard, which accepts an ISBN number (from a barcode scanner) and then tries to pre-fill book metadata from several sources.

For every book, a number of copies can be added, each of them having its own identifier, which can be used as a barcode for the books. Barcode labels can then be generated and printed directly from BiscuIT.

Due to the short-term request, time to spend for development was kept minimal, and developing this app and then getting the books entered and labeled was done in a single day, while still keeping an eye on quality. This shows that Django and BiscuITs extensions for it make a good framework to welcome others as app developers!