The Barcode Revolution

Barcodes have only been in existence for 35 years, yet in that time they have become one of the most omnipresent elements in the modern world, underpinning every aspect of the global economy. The movement, storage, and sale of the majority of the world's products are now controlled and managed by the use of barcoding technologies. Today there are at least thirty different linear barcode symbologies in use – a symbology being a barcode ‘language’ which maps the relationships between the physical white and black lines with the human-readable letters or numbers they represent – while there are uncountable billions of actual barcodes in use. Recently a number of local authority archive services in the United Kingdom have been exploring whether the advantages of barcoding could be brought to bear within the archives domain. Currently, three county-level archive services are known to be implementing barcodes, namely Glamorgan Record Office (GRO), Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies (CALS), and the West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS). At the time of writing the Centre for Kentish Studies is also planning to introduce them. This article focuses primarily on the methodology and lessons of the Cambridgeshire experience, because as far as we are aware the Huntingdonshire Archives branch of CALS was the first repository in the UK to be fully barcoded and then moved to a new building using those barcodes for successful location control. This article also draws on the thoughts and experiences of other services where relevant.1