Most barcode scanners can read more than one type of barcode; we got our cheap scanner from a company on ebay with excellent service. (Sorry, can't remember their name now, but I can find out)We have never used the barcodes that Koha generates; we use a program called kbarcode (see kbarcode.net) which is highly customizable. And simple enough for me, a non programmer. It generates our barcodes and our spine labels. As for labels, we used return address labels at first for the barcodes, but they did not have enough white space. Meaning they only work on a white or light background. Since we are a small library we changed to custom sized labels, which we cut out ourselves. If your library is too big for that, there are companies that will happily supply you with custom labels for a reasonable price. A hint here; if you print barcodes yourself, make sure your scanner can read them! We had some issues in the beginning and had to change to a different barcode because the scanner could not read whatever we used at first. As for transferring from paper cards; we did not have to do that, but we had to enter about 800 patrons from paper. I used a scanner with text recognition to do that, but I had the advantage that the lists were quite uniform. And patrons you can load with the "load data infile" command straight into mysql. For books you will have to translate them first into a marc format, and then use the import facilities. See also http://www.kohadocs.org/migrating_to_koha.html Hope this helps, Marty -----Original Message----- From: koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Shane Stafford Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 11:36 AM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: [Koha] Scanner and Barcode suggestions Looking for suggestions for a good bar code scanner and labels that work well with Koha. thanks Shane Stafford Director Information Services Maine School Union 90 (Alton,Bradley,Greenbush,Milford) sstafford@union90.org _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha