Keep your Higher-Capacity Cartridges

Many libraries work on XESS year-round, setting aside books to be weeded as they have time to identify and pull them. This is a great idea! But it's time to add one extra little step to the process... checking the cartridge size.

If and when you move to a Duplication service model, you'll need to re-purpose some of your white cartridges. However, some of those cartridges (particularly the earlier ones) have a very small capacity; they're fine for one book, but the 5-15 books you'll be duplicating probably won't fit!

Fortunately, there's an easy way to check. On the back of each cartridge, just to the left of the barcode, is a manufacturing code. The first letter of the code indicates the cartridge size.

(List edited for completeness 12:53 EST, see Craig's post below for more detail.)
A - 128 MB
B - 256 MB
C - 512 MB
D - 1 GB
E - 2 GB
F - 4 GB

The attached photo has this code circled. You can still go ahead and mark them NAC in KLAS and set them aside... just sort them into a "keep" pile and hold onto them for duplication.

This is the information I was given. There may be more codes and vendors in the mix... I will definitely do more research and follow up!

Can you tell me what other codes you were given, and by whom (even if it's a general us, NLS, or another library)?

Edit to add: I've tested the (mostly green) cartridges we have here, and this is what I'm seeing--
FE, FH, FD, FF - 4 GB (we believe FF is unique to the peach cartridges)
BE - 256 MB
If any of you find another code, please plug it into a computer and let us know the capacity!

Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

Thanks, Craig! I'll add the full code list to the first post.

The difficulty with doing it by DB range is that, as Craig mentioned, many of the smaller cartridges that had been returned as XESS were reused as higher DB numbers, so there isn't a clean cutoff where all of the books switched to higher capacity.

If anyone out there does know of any guiding ranges, though, please share!