Long Barcodes

What is this?

If your collection has barcodes with a standard length, any barcode that is not that length may be an indicator of a problem:

Why is this trouble?

A longer barcode in the catalog may or may not match the barcode that is actually on the book. It may be an indicator of data corruption (where some characters were duplicated), or of being typed incorrectly into the system.

A longer barcode may be the result of duplicate barcodes in the system made unique with a suffix.

Even if a slightly longer barcode does match the book (maybe due to being a mistyped duplicated barcode), I recommend replacing that barcode with a standard one to make new problematic barcodes apparent on this report.

Exceptions

I don't know of any exceptions.

How to Find

If you are in Alma, there is an analysis to search for this issue in the "Looking for Trouble" folder. Go to the "Barcodes" folder and look for the "Long" analysis. By default, this report look for barcodes that are shorter than 13 characters but longer than 8 characters. You can adjust to what is appropriate for your own collection.

If you can search or filter your barcodes by regular expression, you can build an expression to match barcodes that are too short. For example if your barcodes should be 13 characters long, you can use an expression like /.{14}/ or /............../ to find barcodes that are 14 characters or longer.