Lister Hill Letter
Newsletter of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at UAB

January/February 2001

LHL's Journal Barcoding/Inventory Project

Lister Hill Library is in the midst of an ambitious project to complete the barcoding of its journal collection.
The library had over 100,000 non-barcoded journal volumes in its collection.  Barcoding is simply attaching
a unique barcode to each bound volume and loose journal issue in our collection.  These are used for
tracking purposes such as in-house use of our journals.

An inventory of the Basement and Ground Floor journal collection was planned.  The entire library staff
was involved in the initial pase of the project.  Library staff spent hundreds of person-hours in the stacks
filling out worksheets and attaching barcodes on journal volumes and issues.  As a result of this activity item
records were created in "Horizon".  The informaton in Horizon is not only easier to read, but gaps within each
journal title in the collection are much more easily identified.

Barcoding of all of our journals is important to the library.  The library staff hope to preserve its journal
collection for the future needs of its users and the Barcoding/inventory Project will go far to assist our users
in determining exactly what journal titles we have in our collection and specifically which volmes and issues
are available to them.