I recently became a church librarian and am in the process of computerizing our records. Our Accession sheets date back to the 1960s but many of these books have been lost. Can I reuse accession numbers for new purchases?
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Although we do have Concourse, I don't know anything about it so I am putting all our records on an Excel spreadsheet. I was told we cannot 'delete' items even if they are missing or we sell them because of insurance purposes. Seems silly to me b/c if something happened to the church insurance would pay a lump sum, not the cost of each item in the library.
If you have a lost book in Concourse, you just mark it lost and if at some point it gets found, you can go into the same area, and mark it found again. It does not make any sense to re-invent the wheel which is what you are attempting to do by putting them on a spreadsheet first. Concourse and Book Systems can handle it. Go over to the Concourse User group, and ask a lot of questions there. I hope that they will have a tutuorial with visuals and explanation in time at Book Systems- Right now, they do not. Concourse does have excellent explanations, and there is always tech support if you have that. In the mean time, can you get to a training somewhere in your area? Find a local librarian group (see groups above), and failing that, I would search for a librarian who is using Concourse, and ask to sit by him/her for a while. Concourse has F1 help tabs, and a very comprehensive user manual.
Another reason that I chose to input the info into Excel is so that I can work at home. I home school my two children so I can't be at the church often but this way I can work on my laptop at home. I'll look further into Concourse. Thank you for the info!
Teri,
Please check with Concourse - there may be a way you can work at home and enter the data into your library program directly, or load it to a flash drive and then download at church. And certainly this program has the capacity to allow you to create MANY sorts of lists (by title, author, call # etc.) once you have done that. When you discover all an automation program can do for you, I'm sure you will regret having wasted your time not using it to begin with!
I've worked with several different brands of library automation, so please trust Martha and me on this!
Teri, Joanne is absolutely right. Call Book Systems and ask them if you can work at home while you are creating your database (your catalog) and then transfer your backup to the library computer. If they agree, remember that you must always keep both databases exactly the same all the time! When you get your data entry up to date, then you can begin working on just the library computer. In the meantime, you will be able to generate almost any type of report or look at statistics or create lists of media for specific topics (for instance: a list of the materials that you have on missions or study guides for the book of Mark, etc. We call these lists "mediagraphies". For help in classifying and choosing subject headings for newer items, check the Mediagraphy lists on the first page of this site under articles. And, don't hesitate to ask questions on this CLN!
Sandra Fitts knows more than I do. Are you using concourse or some other computerized program? Concourse will assign it's own numbers. I do not see any reason why you cannot use the same numbers in the computerized program if it's other than Concourse. More explanation would help.