Part of the work I do with Akshara involves running close to 400 libraries across Bangalore. One aspect of this project is that we run a library management tool, (we're tending to go with Koha) to track children and books so that we have data points on reading habits by schools. However, for any library management tool we run an issue is getting data into the system simply because very few of these schools have internet access either for reasons of cost or technical infeasibility on the part of the ISP. Pen and paper is one route but there are too many areas where errors could be produced and data entry is another problematic area.
What we did look at was a portable bar code scanner because each child has a unique id card and each copy of each book has a unique id too so we could scan these books in and out of the system and then dump the data from the handheld scanner once a week, upload it to a central server and then import it into Koha. However, the portable scanners we've found are very expensive running upwards of $800. Our requirements for the scanner is very simple: 1. It has a bar code scanner. 2. It saves the child id linked to a book id linked to a transaction, in or out, along with a date stamp. 3. We can take a data dump that we can upload. 4. It is battery powered. 5. It is rugged. 6. I don't know if we need a display but we need some method of indicating to the user a positive scan read. Are there people who can build this for us? My initial thought is that this is not going to be very expensive and at any rate, far less expensive than the scanners that are currently available. Help? Thank you. Best, Gautam
