Hymnals and Bible editions

Did any of you church librarians add your hymnals and Bible editions to your catalog? We will probably do this as our last effort. LT recommends creating a spreadsheet with, say, 300 identical isbn numbers, importing into LT. We would have to experiment, but I think we could add the "next 300" barcodes automatically.

Our church admin would like to do this eventually, just to have a count of everything, and to have a barcode on everything.

Do you have comments, pro or con?

Judy Russell for trinityluthathens

It seems like you would probably be better off setting up a separate LT account to handle all these multiple copies of a single hymnal. Otherwise it would clog your regular library account and make it less useful whenever someone hits the hymnal section. We do have single copies of a few hymnals in our library collection. My immediate response to a request like that would be to say "No" to combining the hymnals with the regular collection.

Some libraries (especially schools) in the past have added barcoded textbooks and equipment to their standard library automation system's bibliographic database. It has been a kludgy solution, and over time a number of vendors have developed separate software to handle those items. I'm not suggesting that LT is likely to go that direction, but separating your databases would keep the two functions--library catalog and supply inventory--separate.

Pat Shufeldt
Westminster Presbyterian Church Library
Greenville, SC
http://wpc.scoolaid.net

Thank you for the response, Pat. Sounds reasonable to separate the hymnals.