in-house barcode printing

[Doug Yanega]

Apologies for the crosspost, but not just entomologists use barcodes for
specimen inventories...

I've just been doing a little research, and found the following: (1) it
appears that many, if not most, institutions that use barcodes for specimen
inventory BUY the labels from someone else who prints them - often stacked
codes printed by thermal transfer on plastic. (2) there are several cheap
pieces of commercial software (generally around 200 dollars, such as Bar
Code Pro by SNX) for both macs and PCs that are capable of printing
barcodes in-house, using nothing more than a laserwriter and archival
paper, and giving up to 100 million unique labels with dimensions as small
as 1/2 by 1/4 inch (14 x 7 mm). They don't have to be stacked codes,
either.

Can anyone give a good justification why all these collections are paying
someone thousands of dollars to print out barcode labels when it can be
done in-house? Am *I* the one who's missing something, or is it that folks
just didn't realize that in-house printing was possible, and just followed
the examples of other people who had assumed you needed to buy the labels?

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