Using the Linea Pro to make lists and upload photos

The workflow I’m working on right now is this: staff will be moving barcoded collection objects into moving boxes. The moving boxes have barcodes. We want to scan a moving box and scan everything that goes into the moving box, and wind up with a list which can be imported into PastPerfect and used to set the temporary location of all the objects on the list to the scanned moving box. Separately, we want to be able to take a photo of an object which doesn’t currently have a photo in the database, such that we can associate the photo with the object later.

Unfortunately, we have to use a different app for each task. The Dropbox app can almost handle both, but it really wants to crop photos to find the rectangle of a piece of paper you’re scanning, not take a regular photo. So we’ll be using a paid ($6/year subscription) app called UploadCam for the photo part:

Continue reading “Using the Linea Pro to make lists and upload photos”

Exporting to Excel from PastPerfect

One of our collections uses Museum Software’s PastPerfect database, and as part of the barcoding project, they’re making lists of objects to have barcode labels printed for. You can export these lists to Excel, and BarTender can use Excel as a data source, so you’d think this would be a pretty easy workflow, and for the most part it is.

But it turns out that there are some objects in the collection with catalog numbers like “3.2E12”. And Excel really wants to be helpful, so when it sees something that’s almost in scientific notation, it nudges it into the right format. So that catalog number becomes “3.2E+12”, or “3.20E+12”, and it doesn’t keep the original string around anywhere. Even if you convert those fields back to text, they stay reformatted. So it has to be fixed before Excel imports it. Continue reading “Exporting to Excel from PastPerfect”