Our inventory is almost finished and I just noticed the pdf articles on inventory on this site. Of course I did completely opposite from the way suggested. It said to use the card catalog and then pull the book from the shelf. We are a small to medium library, I think. I had 3 volunteers helping so I made copies of the Accession sheets and we are going shelf by shelf pulling the books and marking them off on the copied sheets. When we are done with that I will create a master set and pull all of the books that were not found. Our Accession numbers are in the 4100's but I have a feeling we may have half that number. I really can't wait to see.
I wanted to do the inventory because I am entering all of our books in an Excel file. I just started using LibraryThing but I still want to have something I can print out. When I started putting the books in Excel, I stopped typing them onto the Accession sheets.
Is there a general rule about accession numbers. If you pull a book do you go back and use that number for a new book? My answer was no but I wanted to know what everyone else did.
Comments
I was afraid you were going to say the Librarything wasn't a good resource! I have a barcode scanner. I hadn't thought of using it with the Librarything. I just joined there a couple of weeks ago. I'll definitely export. That will make everything easier. Thank you. I thought I would just use LT for letting Church members know what we had available and they would have to check out books as usual.
Thank you Buford Carter.
Oh yes, The librarything. I was in an independent living retirement center and got interested in their library. The center got the life time membership in LT, and I did the set up work. The library was take-a-book, read and return with my job to shelve the books.
Since you have LT, I would skip the Excel step and enter your items in LT. You will find that you can export LT to Excel and import Excel records to LT. (In LT, click on MORE and in the left hand column click on Import/Export. (yes, you can go both ways LT<-->Excel.)
Don't even think about reusing accession (I call them barcode) numbers. There are an endless supply of numbers available.And I would suggest getting a barcode reader from Amazon. I have one that cost ~$20, and it works great. You can read the ISBN barcode on a new book into LT and most of the cataloging is done. The readers from Amazon are laser powered (point and click)If, unlike the LT CueCat readers
If you use LT for circulations, I'd like to hear about how it works.