Stuart is of course right: when we started to develop the on-line
computerisation at Leicestershire in late 1978 we decided to input in the
form YEAR/ACCESSION/EXTENSION for ease of sorting.

However, at the same time we  established at least three (from memory)
fully searcheable free text fields for any previous registration or
catalogue numbers or references, e.g.

-  1849 to 1906 accession numbers,

-  O.S. (= "Old Stock") numbers used in the 1907 onwards re-cataloguing
   for apparently previously unregistered items found in the collections,

-  key previous "external" catalogue numbers (e.g. on collections
   transferred from other museums, Christies and Sotheby's familiar sale
   catalogue numbers stencilled on the backs of paintings (which go back
   nearly 200 years in the case of Christies London sales).


Patrick Boylan

=======================================

On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Stuart Holm wrote:

+++++ [CLIP] +++++

> The 1907 Leicester system was sufficiently far sighted to recognise that
> most museums would still hope to be collecting new acquisitions in 2027
> and beyond.  Unfortunately it did not anticipate the use of computers
> with relentlessly logical sorting!  With hindsight, it seems obvious
> that the order of significance should run: YEAR/##/EXT but this does not
> seem to have occurred to many curators at the time.  Even the four digit
> year was not universally adopted in the UK and I have seen many museums
> with a mixture of ##/YYYY/EXT, ##/YY/EXT, YY/##/EXT, YYYY/##/EXT and
> often a few more exotic variants thrown in for good measure!
>
> If there was a good museological reason for the ##/YEAR/EXT format I
> would argue that we should program our computers to sort from the middle
> outwards but I cannot think of one.  Therefore I would strongly urge
> anyone setting up a new system based on the year of acquisition to put
> the (4 digit) year first.  This has been the advice that mda has given
> to UK museums for the past 20 years or more.