ruthbrarian’s avatarruthbrarian’s Twitter Archive—№ 10,506

                      1. So the real reason I logged on - in the last couple weeks I've had some really interesting conversations about the methods by which libraries applied barcodes to their books when bringing up their first ILS. It's really interesting!! 🤓
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                    1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
                      But that also got me thinking about how early ILSes meant you could print a list of everything you had out at once and that you... couldn't before that? That had never occurred to me, but not because I'm too young... you see, my parents had a METHOD.
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                  1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
                    I've written about how my father taught me about automation and interacting with the ILS over telnet to generate these amazing lists each week... ruthtillman.com/post/father-taught-me-the-power-of-automation/
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                1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
                  but before that, my parents had a method which meant it was always very easy to figure out which library books we had out and when they were due (critical for a family like ours)
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              1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
                every week when we got home, we'd unpack our bags of books and a parent would confiscate all the date-due cards from the back of the books. These were bundled in a rubber band and went in a drawer in the only-decorative desk in the living room.
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            1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
              Each week was bundled together, so first you'd have to find every book due that week (no online renewals back then) and put the card back in it. Then you'd go through all the other books being returned and find their cards in the other bundles and put them in too.
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          1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
            So we could always quickly generate a list of which titles we had checked out, when they were due, etc. I know it's silly, considering, but I just thought that was "how people did it" and then I didn't think much about it until now.
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        1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
          But I'm guessing generating a real list of checked out items was actually transformative for a lot of folks. Even if it didn't have the cool whole-family options my dad's script did.
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      1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
        Also the barcoding projects -- some pre-created/pre-printed the barcodes and matching call numbers, which led to a lot of them not being able to be put on and having to be resolved later.
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    1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
      Another person told me about having a pair of barcodes -- one was applied to the book, the other to the checkout card!!! The pile of cards was then looked up and the barcode input by a separate team. New books barcoded on checkin or, occasionally, checkout
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  1. …in reply to @ruthbrarian
    The first one has a real problem of having to deal with all the ones that aren't on the shelf for whatever reason, though it could be an interesting assessment. The second seemed brilliant to me. Remove card PLUS make good use of it!!
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