Applications of soundexing retrieval and query caching in an open-source-software based library catalogue system

In some small organizations with limited resources, based on authors’ survey, the library facilities could be decade old. Current marketing prices of library software, including upkeep costs, are prohibitively high. Improving and updating these library information systems by employing open-source-software might provide a better solution. In this paper, the authors present the design of an open source software based library catalogue system that takes multi-tier client/server architecture. Furthermore, techniques of soundexing retrieval and query caching are applied to enhance the system performance with respect to error tolerance, searching speed and scalability. With the support of an appropriately designed soundex algorithm, the catalogue system can largely increase its recall while not compromise the searching precision. The introduced query cache, on the other hand, can increase significantly the system response speed and thus the scalability. The performance of the developed prototype system is verified by simulations using real library data.