Catmin LMS

Calibre's previous library management system was built for a bricks-and-mortar library. Calibre is not a bricks-and-mortar library. It's a postal and digital audio lending service for blind and partially sighted people. The mismatch showed up everywhere: data ended up in the wrong fields, workflows had to bend around the software, and staff spent time managing the system's limitations instead of doing their actual jobs.

A small example that sums it up: the word "Inactive" meant something completely different to membership services than it did to fundraising. The system had no way to account for that. Both teams were looking at the same field and reading something different.

We built Catmin from scratch around how Calibre actually operates. That meant spending time with each team first, understanding what they needed day to day before writing a line of code, and then designing a system that matched those workflows rather than replacing them with someone else's.

Every member of staff uses it now. Processes that had been scattered across spreadsheets and separate systems are in one place. Fundraising and membership services work from the same data. Production has access to streaming figures, member ratings, and borrowing patterns. Departments that used to maintain their own version of the truth now share one.