LMS (Library Management System)

Overview

Financial Research Associates (FRA) provides litigation support and forensic accounting services to various businesses and individuals. In pursuit of providing said services, FRA maintains an extensive library containing both physical and electronic items. After many years in business, this library had become very difficult to manage. FRA contracted with Ideal to develop a system that would register items in six different categories, provide search functionality and produce reports.

The Process

Ideal consultants met with several FRA staff members to determine the requirements for LMS. Understanding the internal processes used to log and later find library items was critical to creating a comprehensive technical specification. Publications, files and electronic files were stored in many locations around their offices. There was a system in place, but it was entirely manual and required a great deal of knowledge to locate an item that might be useful in a given litigation.

FRA's requirements led us to a design that provided a registration process for items being entered into the system, a search process, for locating said items, a reporting system and a basic CMS element that allowed admin users to update lists within the database, which were imperative to the registration process.

Delivery

FRA has been using LMS since September 2007 and has entered over 12,000 library items.