Voyager is a Library Automation System used by many libraries. It is produced by Endeavor Information Systems, based near Chicago, Illinois, USA. A library automation system is a computer system designed to automate tasks in a library. ... Alternative meanings: Library (computer science), Library (biology) Modern-style library In its traditional sense, a library is a collection of books and periodicals. ...

The Modules

The Modules are the main way that library workers interact with the system. Voyager is broken down into different modules that supposedly are focused on helping with certain tasks commonly done in a library. They are implemented as custom Microsoft Windows programs that talk to a centralized server & database. Windows redirects here. ...

The user interface of the modules is poorly designed, badly implemented, and full of bugs. This is not an opinion. It is an objective fact by virtually any measure of user interfaces one would care to use. However it is better than the IBM mainframe programs that many libraries used beforehand.

The modules are as follows:

1. The Circulation module takes care of checkin/checkout of books.

2. Media Scheduling lets people reserve videos and media equipment ahead of time. This usually means a teacher wanting to show a video in class.

3. Web Voyage lets people search the library catalog using a normal web browser.

4. Access Reports is a Microsoft Access frontend that lets library workers poke around in the database.

5. Reporter lets workers print out overdue fines, statistics, and so forth.

6. Cataloging helps catalogers work with information about the books as stored in the database.

7. There are other modules dealing with system administration &c.

The Guts

Voyager uses Oracle as its database. For the web server side of things, it uses Apache. For certain aspects of its reporting, it uses perl scripts. As stated above, for its modules it uses custom Microsoft Windows programs. oracle, see Oracle (disambiguation) An Oracle database, strictly speaking, consists of a collection of data managed by an Oracle database management system or DBMS. The term Oracle database sometimes refers — imprecisely — to the DBMS software itself. ... Apache HTTP Server is a free software/open source HTTP web server for Unix-like systems (BSD, Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, Novell NetWare and other platforms. ... Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below) is an interpreted procedural programming language designed by Larry Wall. ... Windows redirects here. ...

There is no programming API to voyager as such. There is some documentation about the server-side generation of reports. However only someone with access to the server would be able to use this information.

For ordinary workers, the only window into voyager is via the exposed tables of the voyager database. The Access Reports frontend to this databse provides dozens of pre-built SQL queries written by Endeavor to help library workers. It is also possible to write software that connects directly to the database and reads the tables from there. However none of the fancy indexing that makes Web Voyager so fast is exposed for the ordinary programmer. SQL (commonly, but incorrectly, expanded to Structured Query Language — see History for the terms derivation) is the most popular computer language used to create, modify and retrieve data from relational database management systems. ...

The tables of voyager are short-hand versions of the MARC records of the books. The actual MARC is stored as BLOBs but certain portions of the MARC are actual tables. For example BIB_TEXT.TITLE is, naturally, the MARC Bibliographic Record field that holds the Title. The Bibliographic Records live in tables named BIB*. The Holdings records are in tables named MFHD* (Marc Format for Holdings Data or something like that). The Authority Records are in AUTH. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..... blobs are fat! ...

Voyager adds its own record, called the 'Item Record'. This stores the barcode, 'media type', location, and possibly other information.

The result of this is that there can be some redundant pieces of information in the database, particularly 'location' and 'media type'. This is partly the fault of the MARC people because they never got on the ball in regards to figuring out how to catalog multimedia items.

The Glory

Endeavor maintains a big user support website with links to a mailing list, user submitted files, manuals, etc. You must have the secret password to access any of this stuff.

There are 'user groups' and meetings of the folks who use Voyager. The biggest user is probably the Library of Congress but many universities, museums, community colleges, &c. also use Voyager. The Great Hall interior. ...

The price of a Voyager license is unknown but probably at least ten thousand dollars.

The last release of Voyager focused on making Unicode work, as the name of the actual release is "Voyager with Unicode". Endeavor has stated that its future focus is to fix their development process and listen to users more closely.