VideLibri - Manages your borrowed books

A cross-platform app to access library catalogs and OPACs from your local computer.

Overview

VideLibri is an extension of the usual public library web catalogs (OPACs) running on your local device, be it a desktop computer or Android phone. Its primary purpose is to automatically renew your borrowed books and warn of an ending loan period, but it also has all the features of a normal OPAC like searching books or ordering other items. Additionally it has features of a literature management tool, e.g. storing a list of all ever borrowed books and exporting them as BibTeX.

It works by scraping the web page of the library, so before VideLibri can be used with a certain public library, it needs to be configured for that library. There are three levels of configurability:

If you want further help to configure VideLibri with your library, you can send a mail or file a ticket (see contact at the bottom of this page). Unfortunately, if you want a template for account access with a new OPAC system, you would need to send me the password for a lending card, since the account page of a library OPAC is password protected and I cannot create a pattern for a webpage that I cannot open in the browser.

Screenshots

Summary about all borrowed books. Yellow/green shows which books are renewable. VideLibri's statistics showing how many books my family has borrowed. Standard search mode
VideLibri on Android
VideLibri 1.5 on Android (List of search results) VideLibri 1.5 on Android (Details of a search result)

Downloads

On the sourceforge download page you can download Windows, Linux and Android binaries for VideLibri. Since all pre-configured libraries are in German-speaking countries the GUI of VideLibri is currently also in German.

The source is stored in a mercurial repository.
Since the program is written in FreePascal/Lazarus, it should be very easy to compile it. Just open the bookWatch.lpi in Lazarus and select your platform/OS in the project settings. The repository contains also the source of most dependencies, for other dependencies there are excessive comments in the code that tell you where to download them and are shown in Lazarus during the compilation.
You can compile and run it on Windows/Linux/Mac with the gtk/qt/win32/cocoa interfaces. The motto of Lazarus is "Write once, compile anywhere", so VideLibri is supposed to run on any platform and device, although Lazarus does not always delive on that promise.

Hence the Android GUI is implemented separately in Java, and you need the Java SDK and Android SDK/NDK to compile it. First you compile the VideLibri Lazarus project with Lazarus as before (except using the project file android/videlibriandroid.lpi), then you call the standard tool gradle in the android folder.





Xidel

Since a webscraping framework to automatically learn the structure of a webpage is also useful for other webpages than library OPACs, the framework itself without any pre-configured public libraries has been published as command line tool Xidel.

Contact

For feature requests and bug reports there is an ticketing system on SourceForge. SourceForge allows anonymous ticket filing, so no SourceForge account is required.

For discussions we provide a mailing list videlibri-list.

Autor: Benito van der Zander, benito_NOSPAM_benibela.de, www.benibela.de