Why do you want to barcode your books with the ISBN? Is there some special reason for this? It's mostly used for ordering books. What we do -- and most of the libraries I know about -- is order pages of pre-printed peel-off barcode labels a few thousand at a time. They are in sequential order, but we do not use that feature much except that it gives us some rough idea when we acquired a book without looking up the record. We scan the barcode into our record in cataloging, so the right book comes up when we scan it at the desk, check-in, for inventory, etc. If we need the ISBN for something we look it up in the record, or scan it on the book itself.
I'm not sure what you mean by "older" books, but the ISBN was only invented I think about fifty years ago, and wasn't commonly printed on/in the books for a long time after that; it still isn't on a lot of foreign books. Also, you wouldn't have them on other kinds of media like CDs, DVDs, magazines, etc. which we also barcode.
posted 2 months ago. ( reply )
