Library management systems: an overview Available to Purchase

What can be written about Library Management Systems (LMS) that might make interesting reading? This may seem a rather downbeat opening to an overview of the various makes of systems you can read about in this issue, but it is a fact noted recently by Chris Batt that: these days, in the public library sector at least, attention has become focussed on the exciting medium of the Internet, and in common with other sectors the LMS is rightly seen as one system amongst others. Having said that, within the pages that follows the reader is treated to the recent experiences of some of the current offerings in the marketplace. The trepidation for some of setting out on the procurement path may be allayed by the information in the articles, and one aspect to particularly look out for is the opportunity offered by some of these systems to access the wider world of information and the integration of these systems to remote and distributed databases. In this article it is proposed to set out an overall context against which these systems operate and to point out the main features of change as we draw to the end of the 1990's.