[NHCOLL-L:4376] Re: Barcodes vs. RFID's

[Doug Yanega]

Gordon wrote:

>On the other hand, barcodes have been around for about half a 
>century and, for some purposes, you can print them with an 
>off-the-shelf laser printer and read them with an iphone.  When I 
>looked at RFID stuff about ten years ago, getting unique-value tags 
>(as opposed to something like Universal Product Codes) was 
>expensive, and they were essentially useless at ultra-cold storage 
>temperatures.  If anything, barcodes (especially 2-dimensional 
>symbologies such as DataMatrix) are increasingly used for robotic 
>assemblies, and most readers autodetect and translate all of the old 
>symbologies.
>Gordon
>
>On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:34 PM, John E Simmons 
><<mailto:simmons.johne at gmail.com>simmons.johne at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Regardless of whether people prefer barcodes or RFIDs for use in 
>their collections, before you invest in either, the more important 
>question to ask is, "which technology will be supported by industry 
>in the short-term and long-term?" 
>
>Museums are at the mercy of industry for many (perhaps most) of the 
>products we use (e.g., many of our favorite sizes of glass jars are 
>out of production because the industry has replaced them with PET 
>containers; permanent inks and technical pens are disappearing in a 
>wave of less permanent ink in disposable pens, and so forth). 
>Considering how much more efficient RFIDs are for inventory, as 
>their unit price comes down, barcodes are doomed to disappear.  I 
>have seen some industry forecasts that give barcodes less than a 
>decade before they are extinct (meaning no one will be making or 
>supporting barcode readers or software).

It's funny, having watched how this and similar debates have 
progressed over the years - one thing that strikes me is how often 
the people who are at the purely tehnical end of things will predict 
something going obsolete, when - as the arguments above indicate - 
there's reason to suspect that there is enough *demand* around for 
things NOT to go obsolete (like PDF format). Maybe it's my cynical 
nature, but I'm increasingly suspicious that folks who design and 
develop new systems have a STRONG VESTED INTEREST in seeing to it 
that people abandon old technologies - especially those that *other* 
companies manufacture. I would point to the continued existence of 
vinyl records, which - if you talk to any true audiophile - are still 
considered superior to any modern digital recording, despite their 
analog nature, and despite decades of people telling us that CDs are 
better.

The bottom line? Whenever I hear something that sounds een marginally 
like a sales pitch - where it would *presonally* benefit the speaker 
if the new technology replaced the old one - I get really worried 
about how objective their appraisal of the situation *really* is. I 
don't think industry - even in our specialized niche - just 
*responds* to demand, but takes an active role in *shaping* it, and I 
don't trust that.

Peace,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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