Wishlist: Postal Address Validation
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Evergreen |
Triaged
|
Wishlist
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Hello, something that I have always wanted in an ILS is built in postal address validation. This bug report is just to have a place to discuss this issue.
Postal address validation is the process of making sure that a postal address (where mail is delivered) is in the USPS database of delivery points. https:/
The validation can be done at the point of entry, such as in the patron registration form, the self registration form, or from my account in the catalog. It can also be done in batch at a later date, or as a delayed backend process.
The built in zip code lookup is useful, but cannot handle certain situations, like zips that contain more than one city/county, which comes up all the time for several of our locations that are at the edge of counties. The address validation could replace the zip code lookup for sites that choose to use it.
There are numerous vendors that supply software and API's to provide the validation. I've played around with one called smartystreets.com in the past, since they provided free access for non-profits. It doesn't look like they provide that anymore, but it does looks like they have free accounts with 250 lookups a month.
For my own project I think I'll work on doing a batch update of all current addresses to clean up our database. It might make sense to add some fields to the actor.usr_address table to better track validation status for each address. There is a bunch of extra address metadata returned when an address is verified that may make sense to store.
Josh
Changed in evergreen: | |
status: | New → Triaged |
importance: | Undecided → Wishlist |
tags: | added: patron webstaffclient wishlist |
tags: | removed: webstaffclient wishlist |
My library system is experiencing major consequences to bad mailing address data entry. We just had 10% of our recent mailers come back because of incorrect/ nonexistent addresses and mail forwarding issues. We had to pay for all of the return postage.
If anyone has experience with cleaning up mailing address data, I'd love to know how you did it. I'm new to SPARK and haven't found good documentation on batch updating patron records.
I am also here to second Josh and say that I would love to see an integrated postal address validation in the ILS.