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 E-mail: [log in to unmask] ------------- World Wide Web - http://www.holm.demon.co.uk -------------