Scanning Library Cards on Smartphones


Brian Herzog at the Swiss Army Librarian writes about Scanning Library Cards on Smartphones. This is a very interesting article about how we can offer convenience for patrons who want to store their library card barcodes on their phones.

“Something I really like about smartphones are apps like CardStar and Key Ring – they let you input the numbers from all the club and rewards cards from your keychain and display the barcode on your phone.

Patrons also use these apps for their library card numbers, and some libraries aren’t sure how to handle the library-card-on-smartphone situation. It hasn’t really come up in my library, but I know our traditional scanners won’t read barcodes off a smartphone screen. So, I thought I’d do some research to find out what it would take to accommodate these patrons.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 11th, 2011 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Library 2.0, Library Services, Mobile, QR Codes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Scanning Library Cards on Smartphones”

  1. Ron Says:
    February 12th, 2011 at 4:30 pm

    I have been using my library card on my Android for a while, however, I’ve been the only one doing the scanning. I think I am going to visit a few of the libraries in my system to see how they react to the format (as long as their scanners pick up the information).

  2. George Taylor Says:
    February 14th, 2011 at 10:03 am

    We have looked into this, but our scanners won’t read them, anyway,

    We also require the card and only issue one per person. IF we were to allow the scanning via a smartphone app, then multiple people could use the same card.

    It causes us an interesting dilemma.

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