On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, Richard Chycoski wrote:

> ISBNs (and ISSN for serial/periodical publicaions) are neither great for 
> indexing, nor are they good serial numbers for your books (serial numbers are 
> called acquisition numbers in library systems). It's been many years since I 
> worked in a library (I've worked in three), but the way that most libraries 
> deal with books is by Call Number (Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress are 
> the most common in this country) for indexing nonfiction books, Author/Title 
> for fiction, and by acquisition number (a unique serial number per book) to 
> keep track of individual books.

the good thing about ISBN is that if it's on the book, it's usually in a 
bar code so it's easy to input (and if you think that getting a bar code 
reader is too expensive, you just don't have enough books to deal with ;-)

it's also something that your computer can use to go out on the Internet 
and download a lot of information about the book (title, author, etc)

> But if the number of books is small and borrowing is minimal, you could keep 
> it all in a spreadsheet - columns for author, title, borrower, date borrowed 
> - you're done!

true, but the initial question was looking for something for a school 
library. That's comparible to your personal collection (I don't know what 
mine adds up to, but it's a significant number)

David Lang

> I've meant to get my books (somewhere upwards of 6000 when I counted them for 
> a move a dozen years ago, but still growing :-) all catalogued and organised 
> but it always remains as something-to-be-done-later. When you've got all 
> yours done, you'd be welcome to come and index mine...
>
> - Richard
>
_______________________________________________
Tech mailing list
[email protected]
http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators
 http://lopsa.org/

Reply via email to