Better Lending Services with SmartLoan

Yeung Man

The SmartLoan stock borrow-return system is developed by the Computing Services Centre. Its design is based on Smart Card technology as described in the Sept. issue 1997 of the Network Computing. The system runs on a personal computer and is especially suitable for departments or service counters that provide lending services to staff and students. By using SmartLoan, both staff and students can use their CitySmart cards to borrow and return stock from the department. Although there is no need to fill in any forms in borrowing stock, the transaction record can still be written into the CitySmart cards and the SmartLoan database. Through SmartLoan, not only can paper work and administrative cost involved be greatly reduced, your department can also have better control of stock. In addition, SmartLoan can help your department to restrict lending service only to your target users or suspend it to some users for a certain period of time.

Highlights

• Each CitySmart card can borrow up to 24 pieces of stock.
• Stock type and keyword can be used to retrieve stock record from database.
• Current status of borrower (both staff and student) would be validated by the system.
• Blacklist can be used to temporarily suspend lending service to some users.
• Loan history is included.
• Users can still borrow and return the stock even if their CitySmart cards are not available at the moment of transaction as there is a mechanism to reconcile their CitySmart cards later.

If you would like to use or know more about this service, please call our Education & Training team at ext. 8114.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk