The college where I work (in the UK) has a large number of books and DVDs which are loaned out to students. The items are marked with a barcode which is usually scanned with a hand-held reader so the stock can be booked in and out of the system.
One of the readers broke so we ordered a new one, however, the new reader does not read the barcodes. It is quite happy reading ordinary “supermarket” bar codes so there is something different about the codes we have that make them unreadable to the new scanner.
The manual has many pages of setup options to configure the scanner, we have tried them all without success. So we were wondering if anyone might have an idea of the format / barcode font / ISO code that was used so we can home in on the correct scanner configuration - or at least order in a new one capable of reading the codes.
An example of a barcode in question is here. The code measures 45mm long and is 8mm high. It appears to have four narrow lines to start the code and the same to end it, but the format is quite different to a supermarket code, for instance it’s not clear where the middle of the code is. “Longer” bars usually mark sections in supermarket codes. Also, this code seems to have a letter “S” encoded as well as numbers so again it is a bit different to normally formatted ones.
The codes were ordered on label sheets in the thousands back in the mid 2000s by the way and attempts to trace the supplier have failed.
Any help gratefully recieved! Thanks.