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Created by
Sharon Helen Markus, last updated by Joanne Elisa Leary on Mar 11, 2026
2 minute read
Why would you need to include number of pages in a report?
- physical collections inventory
- planning collection shifts, especially when books are not located together and direct measurement (linear feet) is not feasible
- estimating the number of trucks needed to move materials to the Annex or another location
- doing tracers; height of volume and number of pages give an approximation of the size of the item being searched for
- counting the number of exposures needed to scan or copy a book
Where are page number data fields stored?
- in the MARC record, field 300, subfield a (the 300 field and the a subfield are both repeatable in a record). See Marc21 format for bibliographic data for details.
- page numbers are also extracted from the folio_inventory.instance table jsonb array and written to the instance_physical_descriptions derived table. See derivation code for this table.
- NOTE: Some electronic resources have a 300 field subfield a showing page numbers, if the original form of the work was print material
This example below shows 236 pages in the item, which is an electronic resources. If your query is only pulling items from a physical location, you should not get any electronic resources. However, it is good to be aware that the physical description may include
It is impossible to account for every variation of page number entry in your query
