Forgive my ignorance. When I looked up ILS I came to this paragraph that 
explains why:

"Larger libraries use an ILS to order and acquire, receive and invoice, 
catalog, circulate, track and shelve materials. Smaller libraries, such 
as those in private homes ornon-profit organizations 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit>(like churches or synagogues, 
for instance), often forgo the expense and maintenance required to run 
an ILS, and instead use alibrary computer system 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_computer_system>.^[/citation 
needed <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed>/] " 
source: Wikipedia

We are a church with 1500 books we would like to put on our website, and 
thought we would use this workflow:

     1.  Create barcode from isbn number and print label.
     2.  Acquire Dewey number from Library of Congress via z39.50, and 
print that to a label.
     3.  Affix labels to the books.
     4.  Place marc records into a Postgresql database and allow users 
to search via a browser, using Ruby on Rails for the front and back ends.

     At the moment I'm trying to figure out step 2. I'm the church 
volunteer webmaster and not a coder, working with two other volunteers 
who happen to be career professional librarians but not programmers.  If 
the Dewey numbers generated by the LC are insufficient, we'll tweak them 
over time. I just need to know how to isolate that one field to print it 
to our thermal label printer.
Thank  you.


On 08/08/2014 06:12 PM, Kyle Banerjee wrote:
> Label printing practices vary by library. Just out of curiosity, why are
> you getting this information from a MARC file rather than the ILS? At
> many/most libraries, you'd need local Cuttering, item specific (e.g.
> volume/copy number), etc info not available in the bib record.
>
> kyle
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Tom Connolly <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> Is there an open source way to format the dewey code for printing book
>> labels? Or can someone tell me how to isolate just the dewey number from a
>> marc file (I have MarcEdit; is there a better tool for this simple task?)
>> so it is the only field sent to the printer? (I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 and
>> printing to a Dymo 450) Thanks
>> Tom Connolly
>> St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Naples FL
>> webmaster
>>