[Nhcoll-l] barcode printers

Fri Dec 17 04:51:52 EST 2021

I agree with Joachim. The barcode technology may become obsolete, and collections with only barcodes may run the risk of becoming eternally enigmatic. For small labels (slides, small insects etc.) you could perhaps limit the clear text to only a catalogue number, if you are VERY confident that your catalogue will be readable into the far future. A few years ago a colleague of mine had to give up on reading or translating a punched card collection catalogue. Technologies become obsolete, the roman alphabet is likely to last for a very long time yet. Museums prepare in principle for eternity.

Tom Schiøtte

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> On Behalf Of Joachim Händel
Sent: 17. december 2021 10:15
To: hannu at bioshare.com; nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] barcode printers

At the risk of being old-fashioned....
Barcodes should at best be a addition to classic labels and never the only labels on an specimen.
You should be able to read the basic data without using a machine.

Best wishes
Joachim

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>>> Hannu Saarenmaa 17.12.2021, 09:45 >>>

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
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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/<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uuidgenerator.net%2F&data=04%7C01%7CTSchioette%40snm.ku.dk%7Caa35a7ff51344c2d731208d9c13e0ab1%7Ca3927f91cda14696af898c9f1ceffa91%7C0%7C0%7C637753296138318798%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=Ki2t2k5mnlOVOUP0JcIGCOFxb524WGvld3pCpiA13kw%3D&reserved=0>) 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

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