[Nhcoll-l] barcode printers

[Hannu Saarenmaa]

Catherine & All

First, abandon 1-dimensional barcodes.  These are i) error prone.  Human 
eye cannot see if the starting or stopping bar is missing.  It is too 
easy to print such labels which look good but have been cropped from 
their ends.  ii)   1-dimensional barcodes plenty of space on a herbarium 
sheet or similar.  They unusable for small insect labels.  iii) When 
digitizing the collection, 1-dimensional barcodes (such as code39 etc) 
are hard to detect by machine from the images.

Only use 2-dimensional QR codes, or similar. All the problems which 
listed above can be avoided that way.   Human eye can immediately see if 
the QR label has technical problems.  QR codes are smaller and 
prettier.  QR code can instantly be recognized and read by machine from 
a 135 MB TIFF image.

What you encode in the QR code is your choice.   UUID is fine but needs 
a resolver.  A web address, as recommended by the European CETAF 
organization may be better.  I let GBIF, DiSSCo and iDigBio to comment 
about that.

Best regards, Hannu Saarenmaa
Bioshare Digitization www.bioshare.com

On 2021-12-17 00:44, Catherine Early (she/her) wrote:
> Hello NHCOLL members,
>
> I have never used barcodes for digitizing but will be submitting a 
> proposal that should include them, so I'm looking for some advice. We 
> will be barcoding a diverse collection of vertebrates, shells, and 
> plants, and I want to use these barcodes to assign true UUIDs 
> (example: https://www.uuidgenerator.net/) and not a sequential set of 
> letters and numbers determined by humans. Can you recommend a barcode 
> printer (and compatible adhesive paper) that 1) can serve in multiple 
> storage settings (both dry and alcohol) and 2) can encode UUIDs? We 
> would like to print them in-house instead of sending off for someone 
> else to print them for us as we will need to print duplicates when we 
> find different preparations of the same specimen (e.g., skeleton, 
> skin, soft tissues) in different parts of our collection.
>
> Thanks,
> Catherine
>
> <https://www.smm.org/> 	
>
> *Catherine M. Early, PhD*
>
> she/her
>
> /Barbara Brown Chair of Ornithology/
>
> e: cearly at smm.org
>
> https://catherineearly.wixsite.com/home
>
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-- 
Hannu Saarenmaa, director
Bioshare Digitizationwww.bioshare.com
- branch of Sertifer Consulting Oy Ltd
Ukkolantie 18, 80130 Joensuu, Finland
Tel +358-401750427hannu at bioshare.com
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