In reply to Lionel Robson:

>Why  on earth do people allow borrowing of serials?  How many others are
>inconvenienced when one person borrows an issue to say nothing of a whole
>volume?  Have you not heard of photocopy machines?  I suppose while these

Why on earth do people allow borrowing of books?  How many others are
inconvenienced when one person borrows a book to say nothing of a whole
series of books?  <grin>  All in the way you look at it.

The only real problem is the difficulty of replacing a serial when it gets
lost ... Difficulty and <gulp> EXPENSE.

And it does make a difference what sort of library you have.  The Brookings
Institution library is for the use of our staff, only, and we have
absolutely no problem with the idea of circulating periodicals or serials,
bound or unbound.

It also makes a difference what sort of serial it is, and what the reader
needs it for.  It might not be just the one article -- and, even if it is,
once that one article is read, the issue comes back.

>items are borrowed you have to use some document delivery service to get
>items for those who need an article from the borrowed serial!  the mind
>boggles.  Lionel Robson.

Serials can also be recalled.  And photocopying whole articles, or sets of
articles, can lead to all sorts of copyright problems, can't it?  And, if
you refuse to allow your serials to circulate, you are in some instances
almost forcing the patrons to xerox.  Their in-library time might be
limited, for whatever reason, and they might not be able to finish the
article while there, not and be able to take adequate notes on it.  I have
faced that problem numerous times, myself.  If the library where I did my
dissertation research had not allowed the serials to circulate, I would
have been in real big trouble, and out a WHOLE lot of nickles -- which I
could not really afford.

Anyway: to answer the original query, we have our computer centre print
in-house bar codes on self-stick labels (one by two and a half inches),
without check digits, for unbound periodicals.  The bound periodicals are
given a regular bar-code.  Although we do magic marker out the bars of the
original, home-brewed labels, and delete the item record attached to that
label, it is easy enough to figure out which bar code to use.

Mario Rups
mrups@brook.edu
Brookings Institution Library