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Date: | Wed, 26 Jul 1995 22:26:24 PST |
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Some days ago Steve Ringle asked about 'ex-post-facto' accession
numbers.
Maybe better ideas than mine have turned up in the interim, but
for what it's worth:
We had many many items that had either never been numbered or
whose numbers had fallen off (someone thought scotch tape was just the
thing [shudder]. Anyway, to get these things into our catalog system
and for retrieval purposes (and eventually, hopefully, to create
computer search/matches with 'missing' items) we decided to add the
numeral 8 in front of the DATE section of our accession numbers, on the
theory that by the year 2800 these items will no longer be in existence
or some other method will be in use.
Thus, if a regular 1995 accession is 995-3-7, then an artifact
found in the museum without a number in 1995 would be 895-1-1, etc. If
a donors name can be associated, but the item was never numbered when
it came in, we use the 8 with the year we have record that it arrived
at the museum. (so 853-1-1 for something with documented arrival in
1953).
This way you don't have to go back and open up old books, and you
can keep a seperate book, ongoing, for the "800 numbers".
I expect any similar scheme would work....but I would exhort you
not to use the 'x' thing, because it will create difficulties in a
computer database in which the numbers will need to be entirely numeric
for sorting purposes.
Good luck, Steve......Lucy Skjelstad
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