Hi all,

I am wondering if anyone has any experience with card swipers that they are willing to share. Our Access Services department has card swipers available at their desk for students to swipe their school ID which uses a magnetic stripe (not a barcode). The trouble is, is that the magnetic stripe contains a lot of information that we do not need -- or want. All that we are interested in is the Student ID number (from Banner) so that way when a student swipes their card, their Student ID number is input into the patron look up field Worldshare Management Services’ Circulation module.

In the past, a Systems Librarian (two people ago!) created a Firefox extension that effectively did blocked out all data except the bit of information that we needed. The web browser extension has since stopped working, and we would really like to move away from a customized solution for this.

I am wondering if you have any recommendations, or know of a card swiper that is customizable from the back end? I do not imagine that we are the only university with students whose IDs have a magnetic strip, a library has a card swiper, and we just want very limited data to be captured and input into our ILS (WMS Circulation).

If anyone has any insight to share, we would be most appreciative!

Andrea

Andrea Puglisi
Digital Initiatives/Technology Librarian
Westfield State University
577 Western Avenue
Westfield, MA 01086

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Phone: 413-572-5464
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