[NHCOLL-L:4377] Re: Barcodes vs. RFID's

Thu Jul 2 00:38:26 EDT 2009

Just for the hell of it, I'll pitch in and agree with you from the standpoint of digital preservation. I'm perpetually irritated by the constantly circulated notion that formats like jpeg or pdf will go away anytime in the foreseeable future, when in fact it seems likely that those formats will remain readable for at least 50 years, if not more than that. Anything that is well-documented and/or easily amenable to hacking will be accessible for much, much longer than the captains of industry would like you to believe. 

This isn't necessarily an argument for staying with your antiquated technology forever, but it's definitely an argument for being cautious about adopting "the next big thing", especially if you're concerned with the long term. It was at least ten years ago that I started hearing about how RFID was going to revolutionize my shopping experience, and it's nowhere close to the promises of a decade ago yet ... conservatively, I would say bar codes have about 50 years, probably a century at the outer limit. Somewhere in there a transition needs to be made. Today might be a little soon.

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Chris Jordan
Data Infrastructure and Architecture
Texas Advanced Computing Center
The University of Texas at Austin

Phone: 512.232.3755
Email/MSN Messenger: ctjordan at tacc.utexas.edu

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________________________________________
From: owner-nhcoll-l at lists.yale.edu [owner-nhcoll-l at lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Doug Yanega [dyanega at ucr.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 5:51 PM
To: NHCOLL-L at lists.yale.edu
Subject: [NHCOLL-L:4376] Re: Barcodes vs. RFID's

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 <simmons.johne at gmail.com<mailto: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