Instructional Media Service's Inventory Management System

Abstract

This paper, or rather manual, describes the computerized Inventory Management System which was designed for the Audio/Visual Department at Kalamazoo College - Instructional Media Services. The purpose of this system is to provide an efficient and accurate means of maintaining and reporting information which is stored about the equipment used by Instructional Media Services. The system was designed to be as "user-friendly" as possible within reason, yet thorough enough to accurately maintain the integrity of the data stored in the system's database. Much of the system's flexibility is a result of it being heavily table driven. Though this system was designed primarily for Instructional Media Services it could easily be modified to be used for another application. This dynamic feature is a result of the data-dictionary which is the core of the system. This data-dictionary describes the system and the data that is associated with the system. By simply redefining the data-dictionary to describe some other system, it could maintain and report some other collection of data without any modifications to the programs.