in-house barcode printing

[Mark H. Mayfield]

With reprinted barcodes, there is the added expense and trouble and the
inability to change your barcoding style.  However, barcodes printed with a
laser printer will need to be glued onto herbarium sheets which is
undesirable and inconvenient (if not inefficient).  Most of all, the laser
print is not nearly as durable or sharp as the codes that are thermally
bonded to plastic.  When you retrieve a specimen from a cabinet, the thumb
or a  finger will often scrape over the barcode if it's near the edge with
obvious consequences.  Clearly, paper labels on insect pins do not present
as many  problems; they would be easier to stick on a pin, and essentially
permanent.

Why is the barcode label placed upside down on an insect pin?  I'm sure
I've seen them facing up.

Mark Mayfield
LSU Herbarium

>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