Comment 3 for bug 1663295

We are interested in the possibilities of this idea. One of our key considerations would be online identity and address verification (which should be possible through a third party, such as the parties who verify identities for credit card applications), and another consideration is the prevention of duplicate accounts. In a large consortium like ours, we already have significant issues with individuals finding ways to get duplicate accounts, so we'd need to be sure that this process prevented the problem from getting worse.

We are also interested in using this process to create full accounts (not just for online use), with locally-determined options of the library mailing physical cards to the patron or having the patron come in to a library to pick up a physical card if they want one.

If the development were *only* done for online accounts with no physical card, we'd probably need a way to control the account ID number patterns that are created for each member library because some third party e-resource vendors that use our server for authentication need to know the barcode pattern including specific prefixes in order to tell which library a patron is associated with.