Marie Wardall said: [...]
*Barcodes-Our current barcodes are 5 digits long with a leading T for a material barcode and a leading P for a patron barcode.
Joshua noted that Nelsonville Public Library still uses the Follett patron barcodes, so I can give you some extra information here. Follett uses Interleaved 2-of-5 symbology in their barcodes, but the scanned codes are then manipulated by their system so the user only sees a "T" or a "P" and no more than five digits. If you scan these barcodes with a non-Follett scanner in a text editor, you will see that the barcodes are actually always 10 digits long: the visible digits (no "T" or "P") with leading zeros to pad the number to 7 digits, plus three more digits that tell the Follett software a little more about the barcode (such as if it is a "T"itle or a "P"atron barcode). For example, if the Follet library card had the number "P 1234" printed on it, an off-the-shelf scanner would read something like "0001234999." Most vendors of barcode scanners know how to program their products for Follett systems, so they can sell to schools that use Follett. Those same vendors can help you program your scanners to simply remove the last three digits. Then the barcode example above would look like "0001234" when scanned into Koha. Staff quickly get used to making this conversion in their heads if they need to type in a number manually. Works fine. (But don't expect the Follett folks to help you with the scanner programming, of course!) -- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges@skemotah.com
Most vendors of barcode scanners know how to program their products for Follett systems, so they can sell to schools that use Follett. Those same vendors can help you program your scanners to simply remove the last three digits. Then the barcode example above would look like "0001234" when scanned into Koha. Staff quickly get used to making this conversion in their heads if they need to type in a number manually. Works fine. (But don't expect the Follett folks to help you with the scanner programming, of course!) Also worth noting that a few of the scanners at Nelsonville don't have
On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 04:06:38PM -0500, Stephen Hedges wrote: the ability to remove the last three digits -- but NPL's Koha is set up to check for that condition and remove them ... try that with a proprietary system :-). Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS
participants (2)
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Joshua Ferraro -
Stephen Hedges