Multiple Copies of the same item

How do you deal with multiple copies of the same item? For example, if I have 4 copies of a certain book, should I enter the details 4 times, assign each book a unique barcode and have 4 records, or do I use the same barcode for all of them, and enter the details one time into LibraryThing and put 4 in the "Number of copies" field? I did just try using the "Number of Copies" field but in LibraryCat when I go to check out the item, I can't check it out 4 times. It just checks out once. I can't find anything in the help section about number of copies or duplicate items. I could use some help here. Thanks.

LibraryThing and TinyCat unfortunately do not yet have copies management (the "Copies" field on LT existed long before any lending capabilities or TinyCat were developed), so you would need to catalog each copy of your book/s separately if you wanted to track lending for them. I hope this helps.

Thanks for clarifying that. That's quite disappointing. We produce 4 CD's and 4 DVD's of every church service for the library and it sounds a bit tedious having to enter 8 identical records every Sunday and Wednesday. Unless I'm missing something obvious, I think I'm going to move on to another library solution. Thanks again.

Sorry for the trouble. For what it's worth, we are in the process of redesigning our "Add books" page (among the rest of our site, a project aka "LT2") which will hopefully make adding duplicate records much quicker and easier. In the meantime, you might consider importing your records such that you can easily copy duplicate records as their own rows, customizing the fields you need.

Check out our Universal Import page here: https://www.librarything.com/import, and pay particular attention to the custom .csv import. You can download the sample .csv file on the right side of the Universal Import page, so you can follow the file format exactly, and you may want to read over our Help page for how to follow the sample import file format: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/HelpThing:Import.

Please let me know if you have further questions in the meantime.

Dear Kristi, thank so much for taking the time to share this information with me. LT2 sounds awesome and I'm sure it will be much bigger and better.
All the best.

>2 kristilabrie: I'm placing a lot of hope on that tiny word "yet". And in the mean time, have been putting public comments into my LT catalog that say things like "Library owns 3 copies." When we transition to TinyCat, I'm assuming/hoping that those local notes will persist.

We aren't a lending library so don't need (I don't think) a separate record for each copy, each with its own barcode.

Comments/Local notes is definitely a fine spot to put that information. You can also note copies directly in the Title field of your books, or as Tags, etc. I hope this helps.