[CALIBK12] Cataloging with letters in barcode number

[Rusty Tooley]

Liz,

In theory, I think it's doable. It's always a pain to try to trace a book back to the original vendor when the book starts to fall apart, just to see if you can get it replaced at no charge. And yes, it works for the barcode range problem as well.

In practice, I don't know if these types of barcodes support alphanumeric characters; I've never seen 14-digit barcodes (in the various public library systems in my area) with letters as part of the string. You'd need to test your circ software too; our district circ software allows entering the final seven digits of the barcode via keyboard; it assumes the first seven digits are always the same. (In your example, the first seven digits include your vendor code.) That may be a setting unique to our district/system, though.

The other problem is that you limit your barcode range for each vendor to 100,000 items (because the final digit is a check digit, I believe). That may seem like a lot of barcodes for one school, but if you have a union catalog in your district, 100,000 barcodes to your district's preferred jobber would eventually run out -- I'm guessing in about 10 years, depending on how many schools are ordering from the same company. (With materials budgets being what they are these days, probably longer than that.)

-- 
Rusty Tooley
Teacher Librarian
Barron Park Elementary School
Palo Alto Unified School District
www.pausd.org


-----Original Message-----
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:03:56 -0800
From: "Liz Dodds" <liz.dodds at gmail.com>

Can anyone think of any objections to running barcode numbers (14 digit,
generic) with a couple of letters/ initials in the beginning of the barcode
to signify which company you're buying from? It might look like this
30500BC0000111 if an item was purchased from "Books for Children". That way,
the company, Books for Children would have your barcode numbers on file and
you would not have to keep track of which numbers had already been used (but
of course you would want to) and the company could just use the next number
for your next order. Books for Children would know that your barcodes always
began with 30500BC-------. What do you all think about this system?
__
Liz Dodds
Teacher Librarian, Bullard High School