Germany Library Success Stories

Public Library of Hanover

The Hanover Public Library is a large metropolitan library network of 19 municipal branches with a total of approximately 900.000 items. As an open, vibrant educational and cultural institution, it is part of the municipal Department of Library and School of Hanover. The Hanover Public Library provides unrestricted information access to all segments of the population while offering training, education and entertainment activities. To this end, it provides a comprehensive range of media assets to be used on-site at the library or to be lent.

In 1999, in anticipation of the Expo2000, Hanover’s World Exhibition, the city decided that it needed to bring its libraries up to speed with its hi-tech reputation. They wanted to take the opportunity of their city hosting the Expo, to renew and unite the IT systems of all of the City’s municipal libraries within a single, open, integrated network. Hanover was looking for a modular system, supporting modern web technology and accounting for the given standards within their system environment. Since Hanover library takes part in the GBV (Collective Library Association) since 1983 it was absolutely required to connect to the PICA system at the GBV. After a European market review and extensive testing, the Public Library of Hanover found with BiblioMondo and its Concerto solution, the provider and the solution that would best meet their requirements.

The multi-level Concerto platform with its unique architecture guaranteed robustness and scalability for a library system by efficiently covering a total of 20 different locations. The support of standardized interfaces offers not only reduced maintenance requirements, but also the assurance of having flexible solutions in view of future developments. With its use of innovative web technologies, modern user interfaces is also made available. Thus, the necessity of training and support is being minimized.

The Hanover Public Library was the first library to implement the Zones OPAC in Europe. The technology and concept behind Zones precisely addressed the challenge of the library, an improved service with limited resources. With a comprehensive, user-friendly front-end library services solution, Zones provides Hannover with the tools they need to attract and retain new customers of all ages and interests.

http://www.hannover.de/stabi/

Public Library of Hamburg

At the Hamburg Library, there are about 4.4 million visitors a year that borrow more than 13 million media. The library provides a rich and sophisticated range of media in more than 27 languages to meet the needs of their patrons at all ages and for all interests. Their media holdings include 1.6 million books, 69.000 notes, 3.800 games, 55.000 videos and DVDs, 130.000 cassettes and CDs, and over 3.100 subscriptions to periodicals and newspapers in Germany and abroad.

BiblioMondo supplies the Library with Concerto and Zones, the ideal software solution for one of the biggest German public library system that consists of 36 locations. This reliable and powerful solution with fast response times and overall configurable options for each branch of the library network convinced Hamburg already in 1986.

Since the first implementation of the system, many innovative enhancements have improved the Library operations. Our portal solution Zones was implemented in 2000 and, since February 2009, has been connected to the ultra-modern automated sorting system from Lingsoe, which could be achieved by the extensive hardware independency of the BiblioMondo system.

To convert all locations of the library to circulation with RFID is a project in which we have participated and where our system proved once again its high performance due to our standard interfaces and hardware-independency.

http://www.buecherhallen.de/