Koha-US KohaCon22, 27 Sep 2022

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From YouTube: Impromptu session #2: Driver's License Scanner

Description

Presenter:
- Christopher Brannon (Coeur d'Alene Public Library / Cooperative Information Network)

A

Okay, I, don't know if any of you had seen my presentation last year, uh I had done a what I call a hack for creating a new Patron and incorporating that information. If you have a 2d scanner, you can download the jQuery from the koha jQuery Library um and basically, what it does is like if I start creating a new Patron.

A

uh It adds this button up here called the scan photo ID and at least this works in the US I, don't know anything about International licenses or any or photo IDs, but on the back of us photo IDs. There's there's bar codes, there's a standard barcode, but then there is another barcode. Much more complex, I can't remember the it's a PDF, 417 or I.

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Think barcode on the back of that, and the 2D scanners will read that and so I have this set up so that uh it'll wait for you to scan something and if you scan the wrong thing.

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It's going to look at the information in there and see: oh that doesn't look like a photo ID, try again so I'm going to scan the right one this time.

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If my scanner will work there, we go, and this is looking at that data and it's incorporating all the information from that. We need from the photo ID. So it's Incorporated, the the last name- I, don't know how well it's visible up there, but it's incorporating the the address and the name, and in our case we wanted the birth date off of there as well.

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So um that saves the Circ staff some time in entering data and also helps to make sure that that information uh is uh entered accurately is at least as accurate as it is on your your photo ID and uh then you just fill in the rest of the information that you need that wouldn't necessarily be on there like phone numbers and emails and such so that was just a jQuery hack that I had done.

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um I've tested it with several States and it's and so far it's worked fairly well, but uh this year I've had a couple requests from McKinney. They were actually doing a setup with their um with their Library, where they're actually hooking up a 2d scanner through an adapter to iPads and unfortunately, all it's doing is dumping all this information into the the surname field, and so uh at some point, I'm hoping that either they can feed back.

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Some information to me about this or I can get my hands on an adapter and do some testing myself, but uh my hope is to be able to figure out what the the big secret to this jQuery uh and and how this parses out. The information is determining what the the Line Feed is.

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uh It really depends on the scanner that you're using and as far as I know that they're using a scanner- that's uh well I, don't know they may be using a scanner that that's not using the same symbols for the Line Feed that uh that the ones that I've tested I've tested three different ones and tested with George uh here in Lawrence, uh but uh we're trying to determine where the Hang Up is I'm.

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I'm I'm thinking that, because of how they've described the situation and all the information is being dumped into one field, it's not parsing uh the lines because it doesn't know where a line ends. Then that's the Line Feed character. Like I, said: each scanner is a little bit different, so I do have a built-in I do have built-in uh um debugging information in the in the console, I'm not going to show it on the screen, because it'll show uh too much of my ID information but there's debugging information.

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It basically shows everything that it's reading from that that uh PDF uh 417 that I can take and look and see what kind of characters are being used for those line feeds and then add that to the the jQuery so that it can parse that correctly, so, hopefully we'll be able to get that to work on tablets at some point with those barcodes.

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Yeah, um when I put this together too I do believe Kyle from Bywater. He had a a plug-in uh either done or or in the works, but I tried that out and it didn't work necessarily for for us. I, don't know if it was just that it just wasn't.

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I I think it was only putting some of the information in there not not as much information as I was grabbing from the the photo ID. So I, don't know if that has changed.

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I know that it's been updated uh lately, I think within the last three months at least, um but uh whether or not it's changed to where they're grabbing more information I don't know, but um I just designed this one so that it would grab more information that we could put into this because I figure the more information you can grab and put in there. You know uh the better, the less work that the Circ staff have to do. So that's, uh that's all I had to share and just wanted you to know.

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I I still am actively working on it and, if I can, when I, when I can grab that information or if I can get a hold of tools to to figure that stuff out, I will add to it to uh continue to make it more robust and and work the way we need it across more platforms.

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Yeah, the code is actually on the jQuery Wiki. So if you go to the look for the the Kohan jQuery Library, uh it is in there and if you search for photo ID uh you'll find it. In fact, I just updated this within the last month, because I made a modification we have. We have a situation in our library where we automatically build the uh the password the default password for the patron.

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When we create an account, we automatically build that based off the uh the last name, and um so when we scan a photo ID, we were getting some accounts that weren't getting the proper passwords populated and part of that is the mechanism that I had set up where, um if you are entering the the person's last name and you navigate away from that field, it updates the information in the in the password and because you're scanning the photo ID, you may be scanning the photo, the photo ID and then just hitting save and that information is not getting updated.

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So I updated the code so that once it's done scanning and incorporates all that information in the fields it is now leaving the focus on the the last name so that no matter what you do, if you go hit, save or you navigate to another field, it's updating that password properly as well. So uh that was a small modification not going to affect everybody. You know it just affects us to my knowledge because of our special modification with the passwords, but um just one more tweak to it, but I.

A

You know it's something that I can modify as necessary if it's interfering with some other things, if you let me know about it, I can certainly look at it and investigate and see what we can do to to adjust it towards your needs, but um I certainly want to be able to work on it. So we can get it on other platforms.

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No, we we actually did not do it uh and every other Thursday uh video on this uh I specific I specifically didn't do it, because I had done it in a koha US presentation last year, and so that's recorded, uh we I'm considering doing another video, that's a little bit more in depth about how it works, because um I don't think I went into a whole lot of detail on the code and I could break it down a little bit more in a training video. But we haven't done that yet Georgia.

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A 2d scanner, your typical Barcode Scanner from several years ago, usually has just a real Thin, Red Line and reads regular barcodes, but doesn't read anything beyond that. It won't read a QR code. It won't read the PDF 417s, so a 2d barcode. Actually, instead of uh it's, how it reads the barcode. Instead of reading the spaces between the the the bars or the the width of those bars, um it's actually taking looking at a picture of it. So it's it's looking at more than just uh widths and spaces and stuff.

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So there's a little bit more uh complexity to it. I and people listening to me try to explain what a scanner is they're going to be laughing at me. I know.

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But you can usually tell uh the scanners: usually they have a site like that and they cover a much bigger area than just a single line. So yeah.

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Yes, they're actually in the code, if you, if you look at the code, I think I put it in the notes for the for the jQuery library, but I also put it in a statement in there. What scanners I've tested with and uh George helped me test as well. So um I bought a couple scanners that I've tested with three on my location. Then he tested on Insta and make sure things worked on his end. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't just dumb luck in our environment that it worked.

A

So he helped me and, and then I've actually used it in the field with uh patrons and I've had several states that I've that I've tested against so far, so things have gone well with it yeah anyone else. Okay, that was fun.