Then there are those of us in Schools in which all students are assigned an ID number. We prefer to use that as it links the student to other services the school provides. If we need to we have printed kindergarten cards using dymo printers but usually by semester the kids know their ID because it is used for everything from Lunch to computer access. For public library folk... always a mystery nengard wrote:
So - what if I started with a fresh new system - how do I tell it where to start?
Nicole
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Owen Leonard <oleonard@myacpl.org> wrote:
Got a question today that I never thought about before ... but it's a good one -- Where do patron barcodes come from? How do they know where to start? And how do they know how to increment?
They start from the system you automated with originally, back in 1980s. Back then you started with 1 and kept going up. Since then you switched to a system that needed patron barcodes to be a fixed length number, so you programmed all your barcode scanners to pad the patron barcode with zeroes. Now you're using Koha and you can't remember why your patron barcodes are in this weird old format. You're buying library cards with the numbers pre-printed on them and you have to explain to the vendor why you have to do the barcodes that way. And you have to struggle to remember how to program every new barcode scanner. And you ask yourself... How did I get here?
-- Owen
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