I'm setting up a database to keep track of book/video loans. Trouble is that some items have more than 1 copy and it'd be a waste of time and space to enter the data for each item 2-5 times. I was thinking of having a drop down menu labelled "copies" for each item, so the user selects how many copies they have of each item and when a certain item is loaned out it will show up the number of copies in stock in the info section of each particular item. Basically it will subtract 1 copy from the original amount when a item is loaned out and then add 1 copy back when that item is brought back...is there an easy way of doing this?

I have to say right out that I don't know how to do exactly what you want. Sorry. But... Wouldn't it be in your best interest to assign each book/video an inventory control number to keep track of each individual copy? Here are some reasons you might want to do that: Say a book comes back damaged. You may need to know the last three people that have had that specific copy, not the last three people who checked out a book by that name. With video rentals there is a sepcific number of times that a video is rented before being replaced. Whether that is 100, 200, or whatever number of times, you will need to have a running count for each individual tape. I hope this gives you something to think about. Best Wishes, Bob

do you mean something like this- item 003 has 5 copies, so it will have 5 records eg-003-a, 003-b and so on. How would I go about implementing this?

Not exactly what I had in mind. If there are two copies of a movie, they would have two different item numbers and be tracked completely seperately. For instance: Item 001 McCabeandMrsMiller copy 1 Item 002 McCabeandMrsMiller copy 2 Item 003 Bladerunner copy 1 Item 004 Bladerunner copy 2 There's not a "right" way or a "wrong" way, this is just what I had in mind. It may or may not meet your needs, but it seems easier - you don't have to create subcategories. -Bob

Oh, I was thinking of having item 001 to stand for McCabeandMrsMiller (for arguments sake) and then having a, b, c etc. to stand for the copy number...that way there would be less data duplication...i'm just not sure how i would put it into practice!