Whats in a barcode?
Barcodes allow you to easily and accurately track items and reference data associated with those items. While it’s easy to feel intimidated by barcodes, the technology is simple. A common, one-dimensional barcode simply represents a string of numbers and/or letters. Similar to your car’s license plate, a barcode is a reference number that is not descriptive by itself but can be used to look up detailed information. This information is stored in some type of database (a library system or even an Excel spreadsheet). Once you scan the barcode, you can then pull up the descriptive data you have assigned to the barcode in the database. For example, a barcode on a library book does not contain a description of the book or the story it holds; instead the barcode has a “product number” (14 digits) in it. When read by a barcode reader and transmitted to the computer, the computer finds the disk file item record(s) associated with that item number. In the disk file is the book name, inventory le
