MY KEY RING THINGY

Do you have a key ring with loads of merchant cards (and our little library card) hanging on it? Now you can consolidate all those into into scannable barcodes on your mobile device. Or if you have a dumb phone like me, you can put them all on one card for your wallet. Here's what Oli has to say about this:
"I know that there are apps that create barcodes. The one that I am aware of is called Card Star. ALD did register with them which means that we are an option on their drop down list when selecting a library. This essentially insures that they are using the correct template for our barcodes Otherwise they can use a generic template which will work as well.Here is a link to it: http://mycardstar.com/"
However, here is the caution statement. When a patron with an Android Blackberry downloaded his barcode, our barcode scanners could not read it. Again, here is Oli's comment:
"I also had the problem with our barcode readers not working with my iPhone. That said, I am not sure about the scanner on the DVD vending machine itself. I think our developer used a smartphone on the vending machine scanner and it did indeed work."
As patrons increasingly use their smartphones to scan boarding passes, etc. they will expect to be able to use their "virtual" library card in their smartphones. And patrons will not be able to check out DVD's from the vending machines without a physical library card, or a "virtual" library card.