Accession numbers

CharlasChurch Libraries

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Accession numbers

1cedarlane
Jul 21, 2009, 11:32 pm

Is there a way to have LT sort your collection by Accession Number so that you can do a printout? We tried entering the Acc. # in the "private comments" section but couldn't figure out how to make it sort them into numerical order. We've only entered a few books so far, so it would be very little trouble to change the method. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

2BeulahChurchLibrary
Jul 24, 2009, 1:36 pm

I don't think I would bother with accession numbers. I'm a librarian in two different places, a church and a private school. One has them and one doesn't, and I greatly prefer the freedom of the church library that doesn't have them. Think of why you would need them--do you use them to check out books? The only thing they're useful for, as far as I can see, is if you have more than one copy of a book, and then you can just use c.1, c.2, etc. Just my opinion : )

3harmonycc
Ago 8, 2009, 5:12 pm

I agree. Accession numbers are a thing of the past. Printing by subject or title makes more sense to me--if you need a printout.

4fdholt
Jun 26, 2010, 6:55 pm

I'm late getting into this discussion. However for the church library, I do use accession numbers, but all types of media in one number range. I think I am going to out the accession #, source, price, etc. in the private comments for now. (Since I only have 6 books in LibraryThing, it'll be easy to change my mind. I'm busy with my own books, it may be a while until I get to the church books since I am there only 1 hour a week.) I am the head of cataloging and technical services at an academic library and we gave up accessioning when we finally trusted our online catalog to count items correctly. The reality is the accession books, in addition to counting, were a way to make claims for insurance but they were stored on site so, in a disaster, no way to prove what was lost. With LibraryThing, the system is storing that information and it will be safe.

5timspalding
Jul 2, 2010, 1:48 am

The only way to sort an alphanumerical field numerically is to "pad" the number with zeros. That is:

5
21
111

sorts literally backward alphanumerically, but

005
021
111

sorts correctly.

6cedarlane
Jul 31, 2010, 12:06 am

Thanks for the suggestion, Tim! Actually, we're having to enter the #'s as '0001 (with an apostrophe in front) to keep it from dropping the front 0's. But now it's working great -- we've got the accession #'s in the comments column and we have set up format E as our private display with Comments as the first column so we can sort by that.

The main reason we're using the accession #'s is to check 48 years' worth of inventory to see what we still have and what has disappeared into book heaven. ;-)

7Michael_T_Bunney
Dic 4, 2022, 8:06 pm

It's not true that "accession numbers are a thing of the past". These unique volume identifiers are alive and well, but today are encoded in a barcode or RFID tag.

On the other hand, I can't think of any reason to print a list of books ordered by accession number, since an accession number is merely a unique identifier for the volume and has no meaning in relation to other numbers.

It would be more common to print a list in order by call number, since this will correspond to the filing order of the books on the shelves, and can be used to do inventory.

8MarthaJeanne
Dic 5, 2022, 1:50 am

This is a very old discussion and does not show changes in LT fot the past 12 years.

9Lake_Oswego_UCC
Editado: Abr 2, 2023, 9:04 pm

Early on we used accession numbers as books were added to the church library, starting with 1000. We've since used those same numbers for barcode numbers. It was a big project to go back and barcode sticker all the old books, but fairly simple because we just had to pick the correct sticker and match it to the number already stamped inside the book. Now each new book gets a combo accession number / bar code. We're now into the 4000's.