I know storing social security numbers are a big no-no in some countries, but in others it is perfectly fine and legal. At least libraries in Norway and Sweden expect an ILS to store and handle these numbers. They are not considered "top secret", but are used "everywhere" to identify people. In these countries it looks like a strange omission that "personal IDs" are not handled properly by the system, but have to be shoe-horned in as an extended patron attribute. This also makes it harder than necessary to write reports, sync data from external sources etc. I propose that we - add a database column like borrowers.personalid - add a syspref called something like UsePersonalID - set UsePersonalID to false as the default - make all display and handling of personalid dependent on UsePersonalID This way handling personal IDs will be opt-in only, and something that can be a choice for libraries that want/need to use it. Personal IDs could not only be social security numbers either, in an academic library it could be used for e.g. ORCIDs: https://orcid.org/ A further enhancement to this would be to use personalid for logins, as a third alternative to cardnumber and userid. This could also be governed by a syspref.
Hi Magnus! We are seeing this with academic libraries more often now - they issue a card number but also need to record the student number. I would love if this field could be added to the standard patron search fields, and it sounds like it would be!