Barcode uses and abuses

Barcodes are something that everybody sees every day; so common as to be taken for granted and normally unnoticed. Readable, no one reads them. They are used to allow machines to identify a wide variety of non-electronic, real life objects. Barcode is one of the earliest types of what is now called ``Automatic Identification and Data Capture'' (AIDC), meaning ``data was transmitted into whatever system by something other than typing or hand-writing.'' There are 18 technologies, broken down into six categories--biometrics, electromagnetic, magnetic, optical, Smart Cards, Touch--included in the AIDC concept. Many are used jointly with or as adjuncts to a basic barcode system of some type. All are based on assignment of a unique identifier to the object, usually a number. The uniqueness presumption makes barcode systems very applicable and appropriate to the nuclear information management venue as they inherently comply with the Nuclear Quality Assurance (NQA-1) requirements. Barcode systems belong to the optical category of AIDC. It is very old in usage as these technologies go, having first been patented in 1949. It astonished me, in researching this paper, to find that there are over 250 types of barcode (symbologies), each with its own specialized attributes, though only a few dozen are in active use. The initial uses were in the early 1950s and diversity of use is ever increasing as people find new ways to make this versatile old technology work. To what else could it be applied, in the future? This paper attempts to answer this