Page:The museum, (Jackson, Marget Talbot, 1917).djvu/264

234 that is not entered in the book. This book should be kept in library hand and should be the responsibility of one person and one alone. It should be arranged so that the material to be entered goes across two pages, and it is very convenient to have twenty-five lines to the page. The usual number of objects allowed for in a book is five thousand. The page should be divided as shown on p. 252 of Appendix. A loose-leaf accessions book should not be used because of the danger of loss of any sheet. Each line is provided with a running number so that the museum can at any time discover the number of its accessions, but this is not the accessions number. This last is a compound made up of two figures to indicate the year of the accession and the running number to indicate the order in which the objects have been acquired in the year. Thus in 1916 the thirty-second accession in that year would be numbered 16.32. In some museums these numbers are reversed, thus, 32.16. The loans receive similar numbers preceded by the capital letter L. Again, some museums use the two combinations differently, i. e. for accessions 16.32 and for loans L. 32.16. This system, however, is apt to be confusing until one is thoroughly familiar with it, and there is little danger of mistake because the loan number is never put