Close to 15 years ago I set up bar coding in TMS at the Yale University Art Gallery. We needed to inventory the entire collection and move it to remote storage so that the museum building could be renovated. The same system is still in use today.

 

At that time the TMS Bar Code Manager was in the very early stages of development and all it did was ingest scanned bar codes into TMS.

 

I haven’t had experience with the TMS bar code manager in a long time so possibly it handles the bar code scanning as well today.

 

At that time, the TMS data base already had bar code fields and filled them with bar codes for objects and locations, so a big part of the bar code work was done.

 

Other than the bar code fields in TMS, most of the bar code work is done outside TMS with programmable scanners. I had a consultant write the scanner program for the Symbol scanners I purchased.

 

The bar code scans were stored in a file in the scanner and eventually downloaded to a PC where another custom utility would merge the scan files into one file.

 

The file was then read by the TMS bar code manager and ingested into TMS.

 

It’s my opinion that you are re-inventing the wheel to not use the TMS bar code manager as you need a fail-safe way to ingest the barcodes into TMS.

 

If you want to bar code, most of the work involves programming the scanners and designing the bar code file so that it is compatible with the TMS bar code manager.

 

To print bar codes from TMS, with Brian’s help at GS, I wrote a Crystal Report and purchased real bar code printers and label stock. I do not recommend using laser printers as you need a good dark bar code that can be scanned in low-light storage conditions.

 

I have a detailed PowerPoint presentation on bar coding that I presented at an AAM workshop.

 

I will be happy to email it to anyone that sends me an email, and I am happy to answer bar code questions.

 

I hope this is helpful.

 

David Parsell

Systems Manager Information Technology

Yale Center for British Art

1080 Chapel Street

PO Box 208280

New Haven, CT  06520-8280

Telephone 2034329603

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Britishart.yale.edu

 

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