With the New Burke opening in 2019, we’ll be moving everything from the current building into the new one in the next couple of years. Every object in the building will be touched. This is a great opportunity to add barcodes to labels for ease of tracking. If nothing else, hopefully we’ll be able to make the job of moving everything between buildings easier, even if there’s no long term benefit to processes.
Our collections are cataloged in at least five separate database products. There is no way we’re going to find an off the shelf solution which integrates with all of them. For one thing, one of the databases is no longer sold or supported. It has an ODBC connection, so maybe something could integrate with it, but I’m willing to bet that nothing does out of the box. For another, each collection has its own catalog number scheme, and there’s no guarantee that their database has a field for a separate barcode identifier. I need to be able to use freeform text as barcode labels, so that what gets scanned is the object’s native identifier in its home database.
With that in mind, we’re buying some hardware first and will figure out what software to use with it second. Here’s what we’re getting (prices may vary; this is what we paid in March 2017):
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