Simple and free book library management system (ILS) for a small library

Question

We need help finding a book library management software that would fit our needs:

1. It must be free.
2. It would be great if it is open source, or easily translatable.
3. It must be local / offline / self-contained: it is supposed to run in one machine, that does not have access to any network (LAN and WAN).
4. Simple: No logins, just a list of books, authors, categories and users.
5. For Windows or Linux.

There are TONS of ILS's out there, and that's what is probably making my research difficult.

I'm looking for something very simple and easy to use.

There is the question Book management software for library already, but I'm looking for something different. Koha and Evergreen seem to complex.

Answer 1

The best solution out there that fits my requirements is: BiblioteQ

It is:

• Free and open source: GitHub.
• Self contained and offline.
• Windows, Linux and MAC compatible (For both x86 and ARM architectures).
• Multilingual: Czech, Dutch (Belgium and Netherlands), English, French, Hungarian, German and Greek.
• Maintained and up-to-date project.
• Very feature rich and stable.

Great for nonprofits.

User friendly, it can be taught easily.

The only disadvantage would be that it has some mandatory fields, that may not be required for your use case, but that's a minor problem.

Answer 2

Libririka is a completely free cloud based ILS for up to 2000 books (items). You pay if you go over the 2000. I've been trialing it and using a cheap usb/portable barcode reader and it works fine. It, unfortunately, only supports CSV imports and exports but other than that is seems to cover all. It's the only free cloud based ILS that I can find. And I'm still hunting for others as I would love to find one that uses MARC for import and export