Post-Go-Live- Set Patron and Item Barcodes to Unique for Self-Check Machine Borrowing of AFN Items

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Recommendation

The Fulfillment and ILL FG recommends that all campuses adjust the following parameters in their Alma institution zones, to allow patrons to check out AFN borrowed materials via their self-check machines.

Currently, these settings are set to indicate that patron and item barcodes are not unique across all UC institutions, and patrons are unable to check out their AFN borrowed items using self-check machines.

To determine whether or not item barcodes are mostly unique, if not fully unique across the consortia, CDL ran Alma Analytics reports. The data showed that the duplication that did exist was minimal, and the risk of issues occurring from changing the parameters above is very low.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S_s-4sX2fNi9XJ6KXJURqlBLGiGhR9W5/edit#gid=452783695

Patron Data Group was also polled about the potential for duplicate patron barcodes across the consortia. Overall, the sense is that there is no concern regarding potential duplicate patron barcodes since each campus utilizes different patron barcode sequencing:

UCSC’s item barcode begin with the sequence 32106…; and their patron barcodes can begin with one of three sequences: 22200, 22270, or 22106.

UCM uses a their campus netID (first part of the user’s email address) for users and their item barcode sequence begins with 3112300…

UC Berkeley indicated that they could have five different “barcode” formats in their user records, but not all of them are actual barcode numbers.  “We also are now populating one of the barcode fields with our campus UID (a unique id), to allow us to use SSO. They appear to me to be progressive, I have seen a UID as low as the single digit "2" and as high as 1,800,000...We also have LBL users in our user file. They have no barcodes, usually. Just an employee ID that we put in the primary identifier field. They are either 6 or 7 characters, all digits.”

Questions to consider

What are the Pros and Cons?

Pros

• The Item Owner dropdown list will no-longer appear on the Manage Patron Services page when staff are checking out/in items from patron’s accounts, streamlining both processes.

• AFN requested items will be able to checked out using self-check machines at institutions that have self-service hold shelves, like UCSD and UCLA.

• Patrons attempting to use the machines to check out AFN loans along with their local materials will not become frustrated with the machines and walk away with the items without checking out the materials.

• It will alleviate lines at service desks, since patrons will be able to check out all their items using the machines

Cons

• In the event that a patron or item barcode is not unique, the machines/Alma will not allow a check out/in of an item until the duplication is resolved.

It's our understanding that there are 5 patron identifiers that can be used in Alma (Primary ID, UID, Additional ID 1, Additional ID 2, Additional ID 3, Additional ID 4, Barcode, Illiad ID for export), which one or one(s) must be unique for the purposes of enabling self-check without any issues?

When you activate network_users_unique_identifiers, all User Identifiers need to have the Uniqueness Type = Across Institution. This will guarantee that all identifiers unique in IZ.

User has user card with identifier. It can be barcode or primary id (if this is the barcode number on user card), any other ID. This card number should be unique not only across institution, but across consortia. Otherwise, system will not be able to find unique user in the system.

Will users with shortened identifiers be problematic when attempting to use the self-check machines? At UCB, there is a small number of users who have user IDs that are truncated down to 6 digits of their 10 digit campus ID number. For UCB, when they were on Millenium, they often experienced seeing two user accounts when scanning in these types of id numbers.

If this identifier is stored in the system and unique, system should be able to identify user.

For duplicate items across the UC system: What actual effect will that have for patrons when they attempt to use the self-check machines to check out one of those items? Will it cause an issue for requesting, or just check out?

Exlibris thinks that the system in this case will not be able to record the check out transaction and error will appear because of duplicate barcode.

For the duplicate items across the UC system: Should we only be concerned with the item barcodes being duplicated, or is there another item identifier that could cause issues if there's a duplicate at another campus?

You can define item barcode as identifier in self-check machine profile and confirm that it is unique across consortia.

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