in-house barcode printing

[Doug Yanega]

Gail Kampmeier wrote:

>"Stinger" wrote:
>>We use preprinted labels because they are
>>cheaper than what we could produce ourselves.  I pay $4/1000.  In fact I think
>>that we are actually getting them donated now and I don't have to deal with
>>cutting or anything.

I didn't see Stinger's original posting, but I think something's fishy
about that price. We had gotten a batch here from (evidently) the same
place the LACM buys theirs, and they charged us approximately 100 bucks per
thousand labels (just under $2K for 20K labels). I find it hard to believe
that we paid 25 times more per label than is normal. If so, maybe we should
get together with the LACM, hire some lawyers, and sue for our grant money
back. I suspect it more likely that Stinger is NOT talking about
triple-stacked codes printed on plastic by thermal transfer. Whether anyone
NEEDS to use triple-stacked codes printed on plastic by thermal transfer
(why do I suddenly feel like I'm doing an Arlo Guthrie impression?) is
another question entirely, but the ECN guidelines insist on including an
ASCII institutional identifier in the code itself, instead of just having a
number, which adds so many extra lines to the barcode that you *can't* make
the code fit on an insect label *unless* you double- or triple-stack it.
        Right now the commercially available software I've seen does not
allow you to print stacked codes - though obviously the software exists in
a proprietary form and will presumably become available to the public
eventually, if I haven't just overlooked it. It is also a problem that
while code 49 is the recommended standard, it is already essentially
obsolete, since much better space-saving codes (like code 128) are now
available - and the probability that everyone will still desire to use code
49 in another 5-10 years seems poor (and it isn't even truly universal
*now*). Like if we had insisted 15 years ago that all museum databases be
in DBase IV so they would all be compatible - it might work for a few years
while that is the state of the art, but beyond that point you'd be asking
people to NOT take advantages of improvements in the technology, just to
ensure some sort of community parity, and that won't work for long, if at
all. I doubt we'll ever be able to avoid this sort of problem with
obsolescence, though with something like storage media, the problem is
minimal; you can take files on a 5.25" soft floppy and transfer them to a
3.5", then to a zip disk, then to a CD, etc. - you can even take DBase
files and convert them into FoxPro or Biota or such - but a printed label
can't be upgraded that way.

>I can see where this
>might be a boon to museums sending out and receiving loans of their own
>material--like the checkout at the grocery store, logging in and out
>specimens by running them over the scanner would be much quicker than
>typing numbers into a database.

In test runs done with pinned insects and bar codes versus numbers-only
labels, a decent typist works just as fast, and sometimes slightly faster,
as someone using the scanner, since a number-only label doesn't have to be
mounted upside down, meaning the specimens don't need to be handled to read
their codes. The time required to carefully pull a specimen out of the unit
tray, invert it, wave the scanner over the code, and carefully place the
specimen back is generally *longer* than the time required to read and type
in an 8-digit number. This difference becomes MASSIVE when there are a
series of sequential numbered labels, which is something a typist can see
(and take shortcuts accordingly), but which is invisible to someone working
with barcoded stuff. One also has problems with people placing determiner's
labels underneath the barcode and blocking it - placing the barcode *under*
the det label means more work for someone down the line, as every time a
new det label is added, that barcode will have to be moved. Unless they are
mounted so they can be read from above (as on herbarium sheets, the outside
of alcohol vials, or microscope slides), the sole genuine advantage of
barcodes is in reducing the error rate on number entry to near zero, which
is obviously a good thing, but whether it's worth us paying 200,000 dollars
(for the two million such labels we'd need) just to reduce errors is
another matter.
        At this point, it looks like we're going to just go with
number-only labels, and wait for the day Dan Janzen foretold (and I think
he may well be right) when OCR hand-scanners will be available. If
Supertags don't take over before then, which is another distinct
possibility...

Peace,


Doug Yanega       Dept. of Entomology           Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315
                  http://www.icb.ufmg.br/~dyanega/
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82