Do you claim that the accession number is still necessary so that you may know the number of books added and to help distinguish one copy of a book from another? Why not use the Bates numbering stamp as an automatically accurate recording device, and save time and money? Do you use the accession book for securing each month the number of books added in any one class, which of course the Bates numbering stamp can not give?
To get this one record we employ the time of a person in making other useless records, when all we need is a blank book in which we enter in a few minutes all books under date and class number. In the same book we enter in another place the books subdivided under heads of purchase, binding, periodicals and gifts. Thus at tremendous saving we can answer at once the question of how many books are added during any month and in what class.
Do you perhaps keep an accession book, so that you may secure the price and source of a book reported lost by a borrower? How much lost motion, to say nothing of time and money, is expended annually in libraries where assistants turn from their shelf-list to their accession book for these facts which should be given on the shelf-list card!
Classification
Have you ever thought how much it costs your library to have it classified by a college and library school bred person? I am using these terms as synonymous with an educated person. Have you ever noticed how much time she spends in getting a book into what to her is the exact class and place?
Now I am not arguing for less educated people in our public libraries, far from it, but I wish to call your attention to the amount of time and money expended by you in too minute and particular classification. Have you ever thought that quite a coarse classification is just as good for your library as the rather particular one which causes your head cataloger to spend half an hour over a book which might just as well be made ready in five minutes?
Often, after much time has been spent in debating this point or that, about some special feature of a book, and it has at last been placed in a certain division, it will be found more useful with its fellows in a coarser or broader division.
I am only suggesting that time could be saved here without impairing the usefulness of the library.