For the past week I’ve been working on an improvement to our library catalogue’s online search engine, and today I have confirmation that it works for other institutions rather than just ours. If your institution, Bible college or mission agency uses the Heritage library system, you will almost certainly be interested in Era Eight!

Era Eight is a free OPAC (Open Public Access Catalogue) add-on to the
Heritage library management software. It is not based on the Heritage
Online system, but provides a number of improvements over Heritage
Online:

• It is free. You will never run out of Heritage licenses for your OPAC, because Era Eight doesn’t use Heritage.
• It is fast. Search results are returned in under a second.
• It is beautiful. The look and feel is modelled on a familiar web search engine, and can be customized to match your organisation’s home page.
• It is relevant. Search results are aware of the popularity of book loans and place more popular books to the top.
• It is helpful. If Google Books has a scanned copy of the book, Era Eight tells you about it. If Amazon knows about the book, Era Eight presents the description and photograph. It also gives you bibliographic citations in Bibtex and Harvard formats.
• It is customizable. Every page is made up of templates which can be customized to suit the needs of individual institutions. If you don’t use Harvard citations, simply change the template to show the data in another bibliography style instead!

Era Eight is written by Simon Cozens and is released under the
Artistic License version 2

Currently Era Eight only operates on Unix-based systems; (Linux, OS X, etc.) some small changes will be needed to allow it to run on Windows as well. You can get more instructions on how to set up Era Eight, after downloading the latest version.

Please email me if you begin using Era Eight as I would like to keep you updated with new versions and get feedback from you about any new features you would like to see.