About

Abraquest was started in 2004 by chartered librarian Maeve Denny, M.Phil.,B.A.,D.M.S.,A.L.A. and Philip Johnson, an experienced software developer. Maeve had previous experience with school library software, and developed Abraquest to aid her consultancy style of personally helping schools catalogue books. She had (we still have) around 100 schools within an hours drive of Maeves home near Bury Lancashire.

At that time, Philip was very much in the background, having written the original Abraquest software for Maeve.

In those days, Maeve would charge £200 per day for adding books to Abraquest, and typically manage a couple of hundred books per day.

In 2013, Maeve retired leaving Philip to develop the business further. The first thing we did was develop a new website (the one prior to the current website) and begin to make modifications to Abraquest so you didn't need to be a chartered librarian to use it.

Abraquest became more of a self service product and the combination of a revised add books and Abraquest Online has resulted in well over double the number of books per day that can be added by the schools own staff including in some cases by school librarians (children) with adult supervision.

We have sold over 200 copies of Abraquest since then and are still actively developing and improving it in response to customer requests. Most of these sales have been south of Manchester, as far away as London or the south coast, although some more northerly such as Edinburgh, Scotland.

We pride ourselves on being able to react quickly when the situation warrants, e.g. adding quarantine features to Abraquest to allow libraries to stay open during the Coronovirus pandemic.

Abraquest is older than most of the pupils that use it!

The next big development for Abraquest is to offer a web based version that can run in a browser, and on other devices such as iPads or Chrome books. Heres to the next 10 years of Abraquest!