After looking into the available options for the small library, I found that there really wasn't software available which was simple enough for the needs of my client. They wanted something extremely simple that would allow users of their 1500 book library to search for books, print labels and be easy to enter new books into.

I created this PHP based library site which has separate administrative and user roles to solve their problem. Using a really easy process with a barcode reader this online library can read a bunch of UPC barcodes, convert them all into ISBN numbers and retrieve the book information to a MySQL database from Amazon.com using Amazon's Web Services API and SOAP. It was also very important that the client be able to categorize the books in their own categories, so a mechanism was provided for them to tag books with additional structured metadata. Once a book has made its way into the system, users can search through the collection by any number of criteria including wildcard searches and structured metadata.