Collecting ISBN's

The vast majority of books, magazines and serials use the ISBN or ISSN system of numbering. (ISBN = International Standard Book Numbering; ISSN = Internation Standard Serial Numbering). When a publisher publishes a book, they usually apply for an ISBN number that identifies the item (most do). Also, they print a bar code on the item that contains most of the ISBN number.

This last point is advantageous to schools seeking to build a catalogue of items with minimal effort. Normally, to build a catalogue (in any program, not just Athenaeum), they must enter all information for every item in the catalogue, including Title, Author, Illustrator, Publisher, Dewey Number, subject keywords, ISBN and so on.

But, given a particular ISBN number, there is a high probabilty that most of this information can be retrieved without much effort.

The National Library of New Zealand provides a service that returns much of the information schools require given the ISBN or ISSN for each item. This service is provided through the NZBN (New Zealand Bibliographic Network) of which SumWare Consulting is a member. Simply put, the school provides SumWare Consulting with a list of ISBN numbers on disk, which SumWare Consulting sends to the NZBN. NZBN then return detailed information for each ISBN number found in their extensive collection. This is then integrated into Athenaeum and saves the school possibly months of manually typing information.

So what is the easiest way of entering ISBN codes?

Usually with a bar code scanner. If you examine most books today, you will find a bar code on the back or inside cover. bar codes are usually of two types, EAN codes and UPC codes. UPC codes are older and are, effectively useless to SumWare Consulting and the National Library, but the EAN codes are very useful and common, as they contain important portions of the ISBN codes which can be expanded and sent to the NZBN.

The easiest way to get EAN codes into Athenaeum is to use the free ISBN collector program and the bar code scanner that SumWare Consulting sells, to easily enter the bar code. One Athenaeum school scanned 1,900 books in just a day and a bit. Of these books 1,350 books were matched to the National Library's catalogue. This left only 550 books to be manually entered, which was a considerable saving over the entire catalogue.

When doesn't this work as you hoped?

When the schools' collection of items is old (old means usually from the early '80's) or deviates markedly from the school curricula. The UPC codes used on most old books were discontinued in the mid '80's. There is no simple relation to a UPC code and the ISBN. That means that a school with a collection that is predominantly old will not gain a huge advantage from using a bar code scanner (they will get low match rate). But, fortunately for these schools, the ISBN number is printed on the back and inside cover and the ISBN can be manually entered. Manually typing the ISBN is still vastly quicker than typing all of the information for all items in the catalogue, but not as convenient as using a bar code scanner.