Open source alternatives to “Junior Librarian v3”?

My partner is a teacher in a primary school and has special responsibility for teaching English – which also means she’s in charge of the school library.

I don’t have any personal experience of the library and Lorraine is not an IT or database expert, so what follows may be a bit sketchy…

…anyway, the library is managed using a piece of proprietary software called “Junior Librarian” (version 3). The company that makes/distributes this now says it is “no longer supported by Microsoft” (I don’t know whether that means it’s targeted at an older version of Windows or the underlying DBS is out of date, or whatever) and so needs to be “upgraded” to another piece of proprietary software that costs over £1000.

Given the state of school budgets in the UK that essentially means buying no new books next year. The vendor’s claim that the new software will support e-books is also of little to zero appeal to a teacher who wants children to spend less time at a screen.

So, my question(s) is/are this:

• Is there a free software alternative to Junior Librarian out there that will allow the existing data to be imported?
• If not, does anyone know anything more about this and would they be willing to at least explore developing such a thing? (I have some free time at the moment – unless you want to give me a job, that is.)

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