Who it's for
For community & NGO libraries
Barangay reading centres, NGO-run libraries, church and foundation collections, mobile reading programmes. Usually the least infrastructure of anyone — and often the collection doing the most good per book.
The reality
What we assumed about how you operate
Run by volunteers who change
Roles are enforced by the system, so a new volunteer can process returns without being handed the keys to everything. Nothing depends on one person remembering how it works.
Donated collections, uneven records
Most community libraries are built from donations, which means duplicates and no consistent record. Cataloging by ISBN scan and per-copy tracking is how that becomes a real collection.
No permanent internet
A barangay reading centre or an NGO library often has no connection at all. Bookleaf needs none — a router with no internet service still serves the whole library.
Funding that must be justified
Visitor counts from the gate log and circulation figures are exactly the evidence a grant report or a barangay council needs.
Starting from nothing
If there is no list at all yet
Plenty of community libraries have never had an inventory. That is a fine place to begin, and it is faster than it sounds: scanning an ISBN pulls a record started for you, so a volunteer can catalog a shelf in an afternoon without typing full bibliographic details.
Older donated books published before ISBNs, or with the barcode torn off, get entered by hand. Budget for that being the slow part.
A partial catalog is immediately useful. You do not need to finish before you start lending from it.
Reporting
Evidence for the people funding you
Grant reports and council presentations ask the same questions every time: how many people use it, how much circulates, and what is in the collection. Those are usually reconstructed from memory, because nobody had time to count.
Bookleaf records them as a side effect of ordinary operation. Visitors come from the door QR scan, circulation from checkouts, and the collection profile from the catalog itself. When the report is due, the numbers already exist — and they are defensible, because they were not estimated after the fact.
₱1,499, one-time software license — for a library that runs on nothing.
No server, no internet, no subscription, and no renewal that can strand your catalog. Free for 7 days first — import what you have and see.