NBD Biblion – AIDA Online Order System

NBD Biblion offers products, services and expertise in the field of Dutch language media titles. Notably reviewing almost every book and multimedia title (DVD, Blu-rays etc.) published in the Netherlands. They are therefore one of the largest suppliers of information and purchasing advice to public libraries and (school) media centers. One NBD Biblion service is the ordering system AIDA: their Acquisition and Information DAtabase.

AIDA website users frequently need to search and order hundreds of titles (books and multimedia) every week. With this in mind, NBD Biblion therefore provides many details for each title. For example, the purchase price, book cover, format, page count, and blurb/summary. They also need a number of unique search and order features.

Search

First of all, users can quickly and easily search for titles, just by filling in words in a simple search field. Maybe best described as a ‘Google-like’ method. If this yields too many results, we also provide more refined methods. So users can search for a specific title, author or ISBN/EAN number. AIDA adds selected titles to an order basket. The system then orders these titles in a batch.

Batches

Moreover, users don’t even need to search. Because they can just upload an order list they have created. AIDA then selects and orders all of the requested titles automatically. Because there can be hundreds of orders, AIDA provides a complete order history for users. While NBD Biblion originally developed AIDA themselves, they realized that they needed improvements. They turned to BSL, who were asked to rebuild the system completely. Not only the web interface, but also the underlying database interfaces. A challenge which we grasped with both hands.