Using Accession Numbers for Barcodes

The question sometimes arises, "why not use the accession number?"
for inventory or circulation control. There are a variety of
reasons:

In your retrospective conversion, the accession numbers may not have
been entered into your MARC records.

If you printed out all your accession numbers as barcodes you would
have to sort through thousands of barcodes to find and match them to
specific books.

Accession numbers are not always stamped in the same place in each
book.

It is simpler to assign brand new barcodes for each book. They can
be peeled off label sheets, and quickly entered into LEXIFILE while
they are being affixed to books

Then that leads to another question...why have accession numbers at
all? Since the MARC records have publication dates, the only use to
an accession number is it keeps track of how many books you purchase
in a given year.

Get around that by searching 260=1995 to find all books published or
copyrighted in a given year. I know that is less exact sine some
books are purchased that were published long ago. However, knowing
how many books you bought in a given year is probalby less
significant that knowing how many books you have that were published
in that year.