As a supplement to that portion of its report which has already been presented, your committee now submits the following preliminary tabulation and discussion of results. As is usual, in such investigations, our questions have not been interpreted in the same way by all to whom they have been addressed. Supplementary questions must therefore be sent out in many cases and these must be framed separately for each case. This will be the next work of this committee, should you see fit to continue it as at present constituted.
Your committee trusts that it is clearly understood that it does not desire to infer from the extremely small proportion of cases discussed anything that should be properly inferred only from a large number of cases. Facts are stated numerically, but no numerical conclusions are or can be drawn. At this stage of the investigation no recommendations at all can be made.
Accessioning
The material received varies so much in respect to the items reported upon, and the fullness with which each step is treated, that a second questionnaire must be sent out before there can be any uniformity of tabulation. For example:—
One librarian writes us, "We keep no accession book for ordinary circulating books, only for expensive art books" and fails to state what items are entered.
Another reports that "the books are accessioned, each separate volume being given a separate accession number" but does not say whether an accession book is used or not.
Two librarians write that "the Standard A. L. A. Accession book is used" and leave us to infer that every column is filled in.
And two assure us that the promised material will be sent in soon.
It is interesting to note, however, that only two libraries, the Boston Athenaeum and the Forbes library, use the Bill Method of accessioning. The other libraries all use an accession book, but differ widely in the number of items entered; for example, one library enters only author, title, source and price, and another has an accession book printed for its own use, including columns for the following: Date of entry, accession number, place of publication, publisher, date of book, size, class, additions classified (including a column for each of the main classes in the D. C. system, one for fiction, and one for juvenile books), volumes bought, volumes received as gifts, periodicals bound, pamphlets bound, the language of the book (4 separate columns marked Eng. Ger. Fr. and Other), source, publisher's price, discount, net price, binding, remarks.
The majority of libraries reporting, use the A. L. A. standard accession book or the condensed form of the same.