Barcodes are certainly not necessary for a private lending library, but they can make life easier! Some librarians buy their barcodes and some make their own. You can read a little bit more about that, here. In this Ask the Librarian article, Sara Masarik from Plumfield Living Books Library in Wisconsin writes about her experience attempting to use a thermal printer to make her own labels. It was a disaster!

After buying 7,500 barcodes from LibraryThing, I was starting to get frustrated with the labels for three primary reasons: the size of the label was atrociously small, there was insufficient room to include both the library name and phone number, and I fretted about having to “waste” a barcode number when I needed to replace a label. I explored options for making them myself. 

I love my Mac/Apple computers and devices but in my experience, labels are not something Apple products like to do. I can, of course, use Avery labels on my Mac, but the setup is clunky and I hated having to do a sheet at a time. I wanted to see if there was a print-on-demand option that would be faster, more economical, and more customizable than my LibraryThing labels. 

Kristi Stansfield loaned me her Dymo 450 Turbo, and I was off and running! The printer is fast and cheap to run, and the labels look pretty nice! Or, they did. Until the warm weather set in and my labels started to fade. It was then that I learned that thermal printers do not use ink. They burn an image on a label, which is great for short-term use (think grocery receipts) but ultimately fades when exposed to light, UV rays, and heat. All of my barcodes were coming back unreadable. 

I asked about this in our librarian Facebook group and in our email chat. And, sure enough, I was not alone. Michelle Howard confessed that the same thing happened to her. 

The option of using Avery Labels and printing my own still exists, but for the work involved, the savings just aren’t good enough for me to get excited. Ultimately, the labels from library supply companies and LibraryThing are good enough and affordable enough that I just need to invest in a good address and phone number stamp and make my peace with it. 

I chose to use LibraryThing labels because they seemed to me to be the most cost-effective, and because, when I started with LibraryThing I thought they had to be specific to the software (they do not). But, Michelle mentioned that her libraries use the Demco version. 

In case you are curious, this is the scanner that I use.

For more Ask the Librarian posts, visit The Card Catalog.