labeling Archives - Problem Cataloger

Roy Lichtenstein : a retrospective : National Gallery of Art, October 14-January 13, East Building. (OCLC #819413342)

We keep small government documents like this one (88 x 88 mm) in envelopes on the shelf, but put the barcode directly on the piece (in case they get separated). Sometimes there isn’t enough room to put it on there without covering important information (the SuDoc and Depository stickers were already present when the piece came to cataloging).

I brought this piece to a meeting, and several options were suggested:

Put the card in a small binder and barcode that?
Encapsulate?
Enclose in a smaller envelope, and barcode that?
Barcode the envelope?
Barcode the envelope, with a note indicating to check for the piece?

I brought it to the labeling technician, who just trimmed some of the white sticker around the barcode so that it fit:

Disarmament and security; a collection of documents, 1919-55. (OCLC #3122480)

A correctly formatted SuDoc number as it appears in a bibliographic record may differ slightly from the way it is written on the actual piece. The SuDoc number for this piece (as verified in the Monthly Catalog) is:

Y 4.F 76/2:D 63/2/919-55

Numbers in the label that are in superscripts appear after slashes in the formatted number. Also, it is common for a year in the 1900s to be actually written out on the piece, but only have the last three digits in the SuDoc number, such as this SuDoc number for a 1975 document:

Y 4.F 76/2:L 52/975

This particular piece has a date range on the label 1919-55 (meaning 1919–1955, for fans of ISO 8601) which has been encoded in its SuDoc number as /919-55.