Tool development

The Learning Access Institutes underlying philosophy, is to create and apply technology that will be appropriate and sustainable in low-resource situations. We will consistently strive to produce solutions that are low cost, robust and have the highest potential of local community sustainability.

We understand that for many smaller libraries, staff is overcommitted, relying much on volunteers and struggling to make budgets work on an annual basis. This is why our tools are optimized to maximize your libraries ability to use volunteers to get your automation tasks accomplished.

Technology therefore must be stable, easy to use and work for you and not become an additional burden for your organization. At the Learning Access Institute we understand this and furthermore that your local support options maybe limited and that you may require much more then the typical technical support offered by most vendors.

Our experience in helping many smaller libraries of all types with their automation tasks, combined with our deep commitment to communities, gives you as our partners access to technology, services, support, advice and training which is unparalleled.

Commitment to Open Standards

Data sharing and the ability to build coalitions within your community, being it between schools, libraries, community organizations, community colleges etc, is of critical importance. The Learning Access Institute has a strong commitment to ensure that its tools provide open and unrestricted access to the underlying data, and where ever possible makes use of well defined national and international standards for data exchange. Therefore all of our tools implement the full MARC21 standard and support Z39.50. Most of our data is stored and accessible via SQL queries using MySQL as the database engine.