• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 18.01

Description:
The Staff User Guide for circulation implies that only letters and numbers are allowed:

"The Barcode may be up to 20 alphanumeric characters."
"The Additional ID may be up to 20 alphanumeric characters."
"The Patron ID may be up to 12 alphanumeric characters."

But in practice my staff seem to be able to enter any old ascii characters they like.

Are non-alphanumeric characters genuinely prohibited? They don't seem to be causing us any problems that we are aware of (yet?).

Resolution:
Responses (on ALEPH-NA):

1. From Christine Moulen, MIT:

I never noticed that restriction, and we often use email addresses in the Additional ID. This hasn't caused us any trouble so far. It works for patron authentication in the web OPAC.
We probably haven't tried any other punctuation, but - _ @ and . seem OK.

I can't say whether there's any problem with X-server or PDS transactions. We're just getting started in that direction.


2. From Gwyneth Duncan, Duke U:

Both our item and patron ids have various special characters as check digits in the last position:

- (hyphen)
.
space
$
/
+
%

The system regards barcodes ending in space as just shorter barcodes, which is a bit weird, but doesn't cause a problem. The barcodes ending in dollar signs can cause problems if they're embedded in a MARC subfield at the end
- the dollar sign at the end of the barcode gets confused with the dollar signs that serve as subfield code delimiters. That's mainly an issue with item barcodes, though.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013