Sorry, I'm a little fixated on this, partly due to the archival and historical nature of our collection. I am desperately looking for a way to keep barcodes and accession numbers separate, but searchable. A while back I asked where to put accession numbers and it was the general consensus to put them in the barcode subfield (p) of 952. I understand why you do this, because it is a) part of the item information and b) can be searched discretely. But this means you have to print out your own barcodes, a process I would rather avoid given our inflexible*** networked printer (which is on a different floor!) My questions, then. If I decide to use some other subfield (perhaps adding one in) how hard would it be for my IT wizard to create a discrete search for it in the staff mode (similar to the barcode search)? I suppose the process would have to be repeated for each update of the software? I experimented with putting it into the public note. This displays well enough, but you can't actually search on this field, and a string of numbers in a keyword search brings up roughly half of the items in my test collection. Clearly, that's not very useful. Is there any chance an accession number subfield in the item record is in the pipline for a later release? Or, alternatively, I could use some advice on barcode printing equipment. Stand alone barcode printers vs a desktop laser printer? Does printing them yourself make sense if you've got 10,000+ items? Unfortunately, our numbering system is a little quirky using similar runs of numbers with different prefixes for different types of material, so getting a straight run of pre-printed labels would be awkward, and matching them up to the material would be a heck of a job. Thanks for any help! -- Elaine ***I usually use much stronger language when referring to this unholy contraption.