[Koha] Scanner and Barcode suggestions, conversion

[Marty Jongepier]

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 at lists.katipo.co.nz
[mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Shane Stafford
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 11:36 AM
To: koha at 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 at union90.org

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