Question

Valley View Town Library has grown to a stage where, due to the increased number of loans, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain accurate records manually. Your company has been approached to design a suitable system to handle the required functionality of this system. Discussions with the head librarian, Mr. Lachlan Ward have resulted in the specific requirements of this system which have been detailed in the following paragraphs.

Before people can borrow books from the library, they must become library members. They are required to fill in a form which details their name, home address and postal address as well as their home phone number, mobile phone number and email address if they have one. If they are under 18 years of age they are also required to provide their date of birth and their parent’s name. People may change relevant information at any time and therefore the librarian needs to be able to change the details for a borrower as required.

The library has an individual bar code of eight digits for each item which uniquely identifies that particular item. This is displayed on the front of all library books, and is entered whenever it is taken out on loan or returned. For each book, the system needs to record details such as ISBN, item type, title name, author name, publisher, published year and general description details where the librarian can enter relevant notes, the date of purchase and the cost of purchase.  

All loans are made for a one week period and are due back one week from the date of loan. For each loan the system needs to record the person who borrowed the item, the item that has been borrowed, the borrowed-date and due-date. When an item is returned the returned-date of the returned item is entered into the system and it is returned to the shelf.   

Every Monday afternoon, two reports are produced by the system: one reportcontaining details of all people who have items overdue and details of the overdue items and the other report of all items which have not been borrowed in the past week. The librarian then uses the overdue report to send an overdue notice to the relevant borrowers. The report of non-borrowed items is filed with previous reports.

New items are purchased from Suppliers on a regular basis and the librarian needs to be able to access supplier’s details such as name (which is unique), address, contact person, contact phone, email and website to enable them to create a hardcopy order.

• Draw DFD for this scenrio

Answer 1

The solution is shown above.