Adding gifted / specimen books in main Accession Register

[Somnath Goswami]

Dear All ,

What is the problem if I add gifted/specimen books in main Accession Register?

In my view Accession Register is the register of all the books that are available in the Library.

[abda zaidi]

I want the feedback of my opinion from my colligues

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear Ms. Abda Zaidi,

You are absolutely right that any library resource should be recorded.

Yes!  it is a must!!

However, as a feedback to your opinion as desired, I am providing my personal perceptions:

Accession Registers are generally,  records of CHRONOLOGICAL (SEQUENTIAL) Acquisition of books mainly and they reflect accounts of expenditure incurred in a particular financial year/period (for acquisition of books).

Besides, if you have regular fund flows from different sources (like UGC grants, Govt. Grants etc.) it is advisable to maintain separate registers and to specify Accession numbers for books acquired under different financial sources, just by using some single letter from alphabets as prefix to identify the funding source. Similarly, books received as gift should be maintained in separate Register as it will help to instantly identify:

(1) Number of gift books in a particular year/period

(2) Total Cost of Gift books in a particular Year/period

(3) Easy to explain acquisition of duplicate titles (if you have some costly titles purchased and then acquired as gift)

Similarly, maintaining books under funding head (like UGC Grant) helps to explain:

(1) Number of books in a particular period under the grant

(2) Amount of the grant utilized for book purchase for a particular period

Maintaining separate Accession Registers helps you to explain issues to Audit & NAAC people. If UGC sends audit team, they will generally concentrate  on books acquired from UGC grants only. If you maintain a single Accession Registers for all books through purchase from different grants and gift as well, you will make unnecessary/unwanted complications and if your institute is more than 15 years old and your holding is >30 Thousand, it will be extremely embarrassing for you to explain the issues and substantiate with requisite documents .

Never-the-less, if you maintain separate registers, you will be able to prepare Library Statistics far quickly and efficiently in a very spectacular way which will be quite impressive for any visiting team.

Hope I could explain the issue to your satisfaction.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta

[Bhavna Choudhary]

For donated books we have to maintain simple register or should be another accession register please tell 

[G.KATHIRVASAGN]

how to prepare specimen/ gifted books accession register sir ?