Great info, thanks! ****************************************************************************************** Petra Mauerhoff, BA (hons), MLIS [email protected] Manager, Learning Resource Centre College of the Rockies
Box 8500 Tel. 250-489-8293 (Mountain Time) Cranbrook, BC Toll Free: 1-877-489-2687 V1C 5L7 Fax: 250-489-8256 Please consider the environment before printing this email. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dan Scott Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 3:00 PM To: Evergreen Discussion Group Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] self check out systems On Mon, 2010-01-04 at 14:31 -0700, Mauerhoff, Petra wrote: > Hi All, > > I am interested in finding out if anyone is using self check out > systems with Evergreen, and if so, which system you are using and what > your experience has been (pros, cons, etc). > > > > Any information you can provide is appreciated. Hi Petra: Timely question! We just bought a 3M self-check (V series V3) in late December and have it running in production with Evergreen today. So I can't provide you with too much data on long-term likes/dislikes about the unit yet. We're using it in a pretty limited mode for the time being: * barcode scanning only (the unit also supports RFID) * printed receipts only (although the unit supports emailed receipts) * check-out only (the unit also supports renewals and check ins) As a bilingual institution, we like that it supports multiple languages. The major con with Evergreen was that the SIP implementation didn't support UTF-8 data the way that the 3M self-check expected it to. I posted patches that fixed the problem for us earlier today at http://markmail.org/message/px3oadhokmybpuoy - so that shouldn't be a con anymore, at least with this unit. The other con of the unit is that there is a very noticeable lag between the time an item's barcode is scanned and the self check provides any feedback to the user; it might be that the unit waits to get some confirmation from the Evergreen SIP server before popping up the "Getting item information" dialogue. Even if that's the case, I would be much happier if it immediately let the user know the scan was successful and that something was happening and am going to submit that as a request for enhancement to 3M. Similarly, there's a delay between the time the item check out information is displayed and the item is desensitized; if the user pulls the item away too quickly, the check out transaction is scrapped and the user has to start from scratch again.
