[Koha] Parsing barcodes

Jeramey Valley valleyj at bcreek.org
Sat Oct 18 05:48:31 NZDT 2014


Our migration to Koha is going well.
One issue we've hit is that a portion of our barcodes have "extra" characters in the bar code. 
For example, one book has a bar code that physically displays "T 9568" and when read by a bar code scanner it is shown as "00095680023"; the bar code in Koha is 9568 and when the librarian deals with the item, the bar code to them is just 9568. So when it is scanned, Koha can not find the item. If 9568 is manually keyed in, it is found.

In our old circulation system, there were rules set up in the software to drop those leading zeros as well as the trailing characters.

I've not found where this feature exists in Koha. Hopefully I've just missed it. Previous discussion on this mailing list that I could find indicated that it was not a feature, but that discussion was on previous versions.
We are on 3.16.04.000 under Debian.

Producing new bar code labels is the ultimate solution, but with >5000 books to do per library, it's not an immediate solution for us.

Our new, cheaper, bar code readers do not appear to have the ability to modify the barcode output that it is reading. I'm still researching our older bar code readers to see if they do have that ability (finding the manuals for the old ones is a bit trickier).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

--

Regards, 

Jeramey Valley
Network Manager, Bullock Creek Schools
valleyj at bcreek.org






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