My Sister, My Library

my sister's birthday

My sister the editor had her birthday this past Sunday. We had T-bone steaks and Zestie fries. My sister got an unusual cake made with a mix containing an ingredient called pandan, that is supposed to enhance the flavor of the cake. It certainly gives the cake its green color.

My sister also got some interesting birthday cards (including one that meowed the Happy Birthday song). I could not think of anything to buy her, so I gave her one of my books, the Manga Guide to Statistics. It turned out to be a lucky choice, because she appreciated the book (as part of her editing work involves sorting out statistical stuff).

You can visit my sister's blog on LiveJournal to read her take on her birthday.

library accounting w/o excel

I got a letter from the local library director during this month's Library Friends meeting. It appears that my state's borad of accounts will not accept the library ledger being done in Excel due to Excel not being secure. This is not a good thing, because the other alternatives are expensive and involving shoehorning them into our budget. So I decided to write to the state board of accounts to find out if there is any way to get around this.

Greetings,

I am Andy West, secretary of the Fairmount Public Library board of trustees. I am writing, in a private capacity, to confirm the unsuitability of Microsoft Excel, as described in e-mail letter of 5 August 2011 to our library director.

I would like to ask the following about Excel and the reasons for its unsuitability.

  1. What are the controls that are necessary to a software ledger system?
  2. Would it be possible to put these controls into Excel via macros or Visual Basic?

It looks like my efforts are in vain, as indicated by the following response.

I talked to our IT Director about this. He said the controls we are looking for are in the Library Accounting Manual beginning on page 5-1. He also stated that it may be possible to build an accounting application with proper controls with Access as the underlying database.

These controls are either commonsense (and would be included in Excel) or are dependent on human behavior (so whether or not Excel is used is irrelevant). So my initial assumption of an anti-Microsoft bias still stands. But that does not help us: We will still have to either do the ledger ourselves or pay up.

You can read this for yourself here.