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

Description:
In addition to having Aleph assign the patron ID, we also let Aleph assign a barcode for the patron. Generally, the patron id and barcode numbers are the same.

However, when I added a new patron a few minutes ago, these numbers did not match. For example, my id and barcode number are ID1006 and barcode is B1006, but Bruce Smith's id is ID2337 and his barcode is B2306.

Resolution:
The following SQL shows 419 cases where the barcode does not match the Aleph patron ID:

fda50@ALEPH0> select z308_id, substr (z308_rec_key,3,12) from z308 where z308_rec_key like '01B%' and rtrim(substr(z308_id,3,12)) ^= rtrim(substr(z308_rec_key,4,12));

The Aleph patron ID comes from this counter in the fda50 util g/2:

5. last-bor-id 2338 y S ID

and the barcode comes from this counter:

6. last-bor-id-1 2307 y S B


An example of what happens is this sequence:

Z308_ID SUBSTR(Z308_REC_KEY,3,12)
------------ ------------------------------------
ID1903 B1902
ID1904 B1903
ID1905 B1904
ID1906 B1905
ID1908 B1906

At ID1906, it was one off, but then ID1907 was skipped (a problem in creation?). The util g/2 last-bor-id counter was updated while the last-bor-id-1 had not. Therefore, the ID assigned for patron ID1908 was *two* higher than the barcode.

Do your patrons actually carry cards with the barcode on them? If not, it is possible that SQL could be used to make the Bnnnnn barcode for each of these patrons be the same as the IDnnnnn patron ID.

• Article last edited: 10/8/2013