[Nhcoll-l] Barcodes and accession numbers

Wed Feb 24 12:25:36 EST 2021

Barcodes are useful for many purposes, particularly for sorting, inventory,
and preparing loans, but a barcode should not ever be used a replacement
for the unique numerical identifier of a museum specimen. A barcode can be
a duplicate of a catalog number or can encode a catalog number, but it
should not be a replacement for the simple reason that the useful life of a
barcode is limited to the availability of the hardware and software
necessary to read it. Barcodes have only been in widespread use since the
early 1980s, which is a mere blip in the length of time that museum
specimens are useful, and they are already being rapidly displaced by QR
codes and RFID tags (and neither of these will be around in another 50
years, either). It is highly unlikely that the barcodes in use today will
be readable in another 20 years.

It is imperative that as managers of collections, we consider the long-term
usability of the collections and data that we care for. Databases and
barcodes are useful tools, but they are not permanent. We must consider the
future cost, liability, and carbon footprint of continually upgrading
databases (which is always fraught with loss and data degradation), and the
fugitive nature of tools that come to us from industry, such as barcodes
(once industry is done with the tool, it will disappear from the market).
Without a clearly marked catalog number that can be read by a human being,
specimens marked only with barcodes will be very difficult to manage, and
collections will be faced with the enormously expensive task of replacing
barcodes with catalog numbers on specimens that lack them.

It should also be pointed out that you can achieve the permanence of a
clearly marked catalog number with the convenience of a barcode by writing
or printing the catalog numbers on tag or label and reading them with an
optical scanner.

The confusion between accession number and catalog number is the result of
the words being used for years as synonyms, which they are not. From a
legal aspect, the distinction is important. Accessioning is the process by
which a museum takes possession of an object or specimen and thus becomes
legally responsible for it; cataloging is the process or organizing into
distinct categories. The word accession is derived from the Latin word
*accessio*, meaning increase; catalog is derived from the Latin *catalogus*,
meaning a counting up.

The importance of the accession number is that it should be the number that
links all information (documentation) about the object or specimen and its
acquisition. For this reason, such documents as bills of sale, permits,
permissions, import/export declarations, field notes, etc. should all be
marked with the accession number.

All museums use (or should use) a unique numerical identifier to
distinguish individual objects or specimens, but because of the way
collections are acquired, which number a museum uses and what that number
is called varies. Because most art and history museums acquire objects
one-by-one, they usually use an accession number both to register each
object and link it to its documentation, and to identify it. However, in
natural history museums we usually acquire objects in groups of more than
one, and label them with a single accession number. To distinguish
individual objects within the same accession, we assign individual catalog
numbers to them (individually, or by lot, depending on the tradition in the
discipline).

What is important is that all museums are doing the same thing―we acquire
objects, take possession of them (accession them), and then mark them with
a unique identifier (an accession number or a catalog number).

These are the definitions from *Museum Registration Methods* (6th edition,
2020):

An accession is “one or more objects acquired at the same time from a
single source constituting a single addition to the permanent collection.”

Accessioning is “the formal process of taking possession of and recording
of one or more objects for inclusion in the collection,” and thus the
accession number is “a unique control number used to identify the object(s)
in an accession.”

A catalog is a “list of the contents of a collection,” and cataloging means
“to organize the information about accessioned collection objects into
categories; the creation of a record of information specific to an object,”
thus a catalog number is “a number assigned to an individual object during
the cataloging process.”

For more detailed information on the legal aspects of what accession means
in museums, see chapter four of A Legal Primer on Managing Museum
Collections (3rd edition, 2012).

--John

John E. Simmons
Writer and Museum Consultant
Museologica
*and*
Associate Curator of Collections
Earth and Mineral Science Museum & Art Gallery
Penn State University
*and*
Investigador Asociado, Departamento de Ornitologia
Museo de Historia Natural, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima

On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 10:06 AM Miller, Andrew Nicholas <
amiller7 at illinois.edu> wrote:

> Now that we are barcoding our herbarium specimens, we are thinking about
> dropping our historical method of assigning internal accession numbers.  Is
> there any reason to keep both numbers.
>
> Thanks,
> Andy
>
> –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
> Andrew Miller, Ph.D.
> Mycologist and Director of the Herbarium/Fungarium
> University of Illinois
> Illinois Natural History Survey
> 1816 South Oak Street
> Champaign, IL  61820-6970
> phone: (217) 244-0439
> email: amiller7 at illinois.edu
> website: http://wwx.inhs.illinois.edu/research/pi/amiller
>
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