In his reply to Jan McCormick, Patrick Boylan P writes:

>Not sure I understand the question: what's wrong with ".../2000"?
>
>In the UK the current year date has been written in full since the
>introduction in about 1907 of what became know as the "Leicester system"
>of numbering - i.e. accession numbers in the form: ##/YEAR/EXT
>(where ## is the sequence number for accessions in that year, and EXT is
>the extension number for parts or items within that accession).

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.

Of course if you have inherited a variety of systems from your
predescessors it may not be that simple.  The approach outlined by Mick
Cooper is one way round the problem of variations over time:

>We break our accession numbers (which go back to 1878) into 7 fields:
>museum code (string), accession year (number), item number (number),
>part number (number), sub-part letter (string), and part number (as
>string so we cannot record ranges, such as "1-10") and then sort on the
>whole bally lot.

Another approach is to record the accession number data in two fields:

a)  Assigned number - The accession number as originally allocated
(exactly as it appears in the accession register, in other contemporary
documentation or marked on the object itself).

b)  Record number - The accession number in a "normalised" form,
analysed into its components (as in Mick Cooper's example) and then
reconstructed in a consistent logical sequence.  This is the form of
number which is used for sorting, etc. in the information management
system.

For example:
273.1924.6 (assigned number) is equivalent to 1924.273.6 (record number)

For this to work, your software needs to be able to sort intelligently
on multi-element numbers.  Not all museum software can do this, so
Mick's approach will often be the best solution.  It should also be
noted that Assigned number does not appear amongst the mda's Spectrum
Units of Information (successor to the old MDA Data Standard) although
since Accession number is also omitted I assume that both are intended
somehow to be recorded as types of Object number (perhaps I'm missing
something here).

Of course you can avoid all this hassle by ignoring the year of
accession and just using a continuous running number.  This would be my
preferred option but it does not seem to be very popular.

Sorry to have gone on at such length!

Best wishes

Stuart
------
Stuart Holm, Heritage Documentation Projects            Tel: 01603 870772
2 New Road, Reepham, Norwich NR10 4LP                   Fax: 0870 055 3623
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