An interesting poster session from Roskilde Bibliotek in Denmark. They have started to accept online payment for Aleph fines. They do this very simply with a 3rd party service called ‘DIBS’ (http://www.dibs.dk) which handles the credit card payment, and communicates with Aleph.
The workflow is that the user logs into Aleph, sees payments due, and chooses to pay them. They click a button which passes them onto the DIBS website, with the correct amount ready to pay. They enter their details (credit card number etc.) and click ‘pay’, and DIBS accepts payment, and passes details of the payment back to Aleph.
It wasn’t completely clear how this last bit of communication was achieved – apparently programmed by Fujitsu (who are the Aleph distributers in Scandanavia), but the presenter though it had been done using the x-server.
We’ve always been slightly wary of taking card payment for fines, partly because of the transaction charge is high on relatively small amounts. However, in this case, they were passing the charge on to the user (approximately 10-12 pence per transaction), and this seems to be accepted.
I’m not sure this would be accepted in our library, but perhaps we could support this when the fine is over a certain amount?