Colour Bar -- newbie question

Short answer: Yes. Record 1 minute of colourbar to the beginning of every tape.

long answer:

If you want to do it like the professionals, record 1 minute of colourbar to the beginning of every material tape. If you could change the timecode it should start from 01:00:00:00 for the first tape. And to 02:00:00:00 for the second tape. And then again 03:00:00:00 for the third tape. This way when you edit the material you can recognise every tape. But normally you can't change the timecode on a small DV-camera, so they can just start from 00:00:00:00.

The colourbar can be used for calibrating the material when it is taken into the edit (you usually don't have to do this with DV-material, but it's good to know that the camera is recording normal colors.) You can calibrate the bars with a vectorscope.