Scenario
Sure Start is a Northern Ireland-wide charity providing training and education for the parents of pre-school children in a particular community or region.  They employ professional Staff (for example, Teachers and Midwives) involved with the delivery of the courses and events.  They also have Administration Staff who support the needs of the Professional Staff and a large number of volunteers who help the Professional Staff and Administrative Staff in the day to day activities of the organisation.

Sure Start have extensive educational, welfare and social/recreational resources (books, CDs and videos) on their premises that Staff, Volunteers and Parents can borrow. To date the details of lending resources have been kept in an ad hoc fashion.  A number of problems have occurred that have made it necessary to have a formal system to record the items borrowed, who has borrowed them and for how long.  Additionally, there is also a requirement to track any items which are overdue or missing.

As Sure Start have no experience in Database Development or operating a Library Management System they have asked you to develop a customised system to meet their needs.  Specifically, a system capable of delivering the following functionality has been requested.

Requested Functionality
•	The recording and management of service user and system operator information.
This includes professional staff, administrative staff parents and volunteers.  The recorded details must include the type of service user i.e. professional, admin, parent or volunteer.

•	The recording and management of Sure Start resources.
This should include the details of a resource (e.g. Publisher; Version, Title, Year of Publication etc.), type (e.g. Book, DVD, Audio CD etc.) and the number currently in stock.

•	Resource loan management
This comprises all functionality associated with the issuing and return of Sure Start resources, including late returns.  Note that while the screenshots below illustrate the use of a ‘late fee’ for overdue resources, this is not considered a ‘must have’ feature for the prototype system.

•	Search facilities
System users should be able to perform a number of useful searches to support the operation of the database system.  This may include, but is not limited to, wildcard or full searches of service users, resources and loans by a number of different attributes.

•	System Reports
System users should be able to produce a variety of useful reports, which may or may not be integrated with the abovementioned search facilities.  Remember that reports may be printed by a user, accordingly, layout and design must take this into consideration.  Including calculated fields in some reports would be useful, but not essential.

•	Intuitive and User Friendly Interface
To encourage adoption of the new database system, care should be taken to ensure that all aspects of the user interface are intuitive and user friendly.

The above outlines the functionality that must be delivered for the prototype database system. Additional features that fall outside this scope will not attract any additional merit.  To achieve maximum marks, your time should be spent implementing the above to the highest possible standard.