Journal of the Society of Archivists

Vol. 31, No. 1, April 2010, 51–62

The Barcode Revolution

Alan Akeroyd

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

Why bother with barcodes?

No one starts a large, lengthy and potentially expensive project without good reason,
and so there has to be a genuine business case for undertaking a radical project to
associate every document or box with a barcode. One common business factor
behind all the recent archival interest in barcodes has been the growing awareness
that a likely repository move is on the long term horizon, and that the current

Correspondence to: Alan Akeroyd, Technical Services and Modernisation Manager, Cambridge-
shire Archives, Box RES 1009, Shire Hall, Castle Hill, Cambridge CB3 0AP, UK.
Email: Alan.Akeroyd@cambridgeshire.gov.uk

ISSN 0037-9816 (print)/ISSN 1465-3907 (online) Ó 2010 Society of Archivists

DOI: 10.1080/00379811003658492
52 A. Akeroyd
in-house location systems may not be up to the task of managing the move. An
incentive arises, therefore, to step away from a move control system which relies on
paper and clipboards, and step towards something quicker and more automated
instead. In addition, barcodes hold potential for a wide range of other collections
management applications, not just repository moves.
In 2006 it was confirmed that the archives held in the County Record Office in
Grammar School Walk, Huntingdon, would move to purpose-built storage as part of
a new Huntingdon Library and Archives building (HLA). At the same time work was
underway to design a new building in Cambridge which would store archival records
currently held on Cambridge’s Shire Hall site. Moving two entire repositories within
a short space of time is a daunting prospect for anyone, but in Cambridgeshire we
faced additional challenges. Firstly, neither record office had a comprehensive
location list, which made it difficult and time-consuming for staff to find documents.
Secondly, a large proportion of the collections was not boxed, making any move
much more difficult and dangerous for the records. Thirdly, only a few collections
were properly catalogued. Any move solution we adopted would have to be able to
manage uncatalogued collections as successfully as catalogued ones. Fourthly, we
were under corporate pressure to keep our closure time for the move down to an
absolute minimum: weeks rather than months. And finally, it became apparent at an
early stage in the planning for HLA that the new storage available for archives was
going to be extremely tight. We would have to adopt an innovative storage strategy
simply to get everything into the shelving available.
It was this last factor which ultimately became the driver for change. At the County
Record Office in Huntingdon records were stored by collection. The majority of the
records of a specific institution, such as a parish church, were physically stored
together as adjacent volumes or adjacent boxes. This made document production
straightforward (especially for collections which were only weakly listed) but meant
that the storage itself was inefficient, with clear space often between boxes or above
volumes. Our new storage at HLA would have to be much more efficient to optimise
use of the space. All boxes of a given size would have to be stored on shelving
designed specifically for that size. Volumes would be dispersed throughout the
repository depending on their height and depth. Storage would mainly be by format
rather than collection.
Barcoding emerged as a realistic way for us to meet this challenge. If the barcodes
worked as we believed, then we could manage our move by scanning barcodes rather
than by manually and laboriously ticking numbers on paper lists. Moreover,
production staff could find documents after the move by looking up their exact
locations in a database rather than by searching with the eye of faith along a series of
shelves. It also meant that the collections could be much more tightly audited during
the move process.
Similar issues have driven the adoption of barcodes elsewhere. Glamorgan is
currently constructing a new building on part of the Leckwith development in
Cardiff, next door to Cardiff City Football Club’s new stadium. The use of barcodes
 The Barcode Revolution 53

will make it possible to move 15 km of records in a short space of time by scanning

them out of their current locations, scanning them in transit as they go onto a lorry,
and then scanning them in their new locations at Leckwith. At the same time, the
current physical arrangement of the collections will be broken up, so that documents
can be stored by format rather than by collection. At West Yorkshire, barcoding is
gradually being introduced as a means to improve document control across eight
storage locations and five public service points. The WYAS Bradford office was
moved in 2007 alongside the move of a third of the collections at Leeds, and future
storage rationalisation is likely, which has prompted staff to consider alternatives to
the traditional methods of move management. When WYAS became aware of
the barcoding strategy already in use at Cambridgeshire, therefore, barcoding work
began at WYAS Leeds as part of a wider project to decrease document production
times by improving collections location information, and in anticipation of future
moves.
This is all jumping ahead of the story somewhat. Back in 2006, as far as we at
Cambridgeshire knew, no one in the local authority archives sector had ever imple-
mented barcoding to manage an entire archives repository. We were in the unusual
position (for us) of having no one around from whom we could copy.2 There were a
number of questions which we needed to answer before we could begin.

The first question: a single database or multiple databases?

In 2006 we had barely begun to use CALM. There were few records on the catalogue
database, and we were not using the locations database at all. So we had no real legacy
problems with trying to adapt a pre-existing database implementation to a new set of
information.
CALM as it stands does not interface directly in bulk with a barcode reader. Data
scanned by a barcode reader can be input into a single field within a catalogue record,
as long as that particular catalogue record is onscreen, and the cursor is flashing in
the field. In this context, the barcode scanner works just like any other input device,
such as a keyboard. But the real advantages of barcodes only become apparent when
used on a large scale, and it is here that problems arise with CALM, because the
barcodes would need to be input en masse. We therefore needed a more indirect
approach which we could achieve either by keeping the barcodes within a separate
system outside of CALM, or by feeding the barcodes into a different application from
which they could then be imported into CALM.
Keeping the barcode data in a wholly separate system from CALM is a viable
approach, and is one which has been adopted elsewhere. At Glamorgan the decision
has been made to keep location barcode data in a Microsoft Access database which is
independent of Glamorgan’s main CALM catalogue, largely because of the fact that
some collections were uncatalogued and therefore not in CALM at all. But this may
only be temporary. Once Glamorgan’s catalogue is fully populated, the intention is to
attach barcode data to all item level records, and then use CALM in much the same
54 A. Akeroyd
way that Cambridgeshire and West Yorkshire are already doing. At that point the
Access database can be abandoned.
In Cambridgeshire we came to the decision that we would try to keep all data,
including the barcode data, within CALM, irrespective of whether a collection was
catalogued or not. We believed that a CALM-only solution would minimise the
amount of clicking between systems to discover information about a document.
More importantly, a CALM-only approach was in tune with one of the guiding
principles we adopted when we first procured and implemented CALM, which was to
have a clean and single point of information about our documentary holdings. Before
we acquired CALM our holdings information was scattered across a confusing variety
of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, and paper registers, spread
incoherently around record office filing cabinets and the corporate electronic
network. Acquiring CALM gave us the opportunity to overhaul this data soup and
start afresh, so that catalogue information, exhibition captions, publication histories,
digital image metadata, information about intellectual property rights (such as
copyright) and accession details would all be held on one system. Segregating
location data into a separate application felt like a step backwards, and would
contradict our data philosophy.
That still left us with the challenge of determining how masses of barcode data
could be uploaded into CALM, an application which has never really been developed
with barcodes in mind. Records management systems are used to handling barcodes,
so we briefly toyed with the idea of exporting our catalogues from CALM as (say)
tab-separated files into a system like TRIM which could handle the barcode input,
and then back into CALM again. The exports would need checking, which is seemed
easiest to do in Excel, so the data flow would therefore be CALM 4 Excel 4
TRIM 4 Excel 4 CALM. A visit to see TRIM in operation at Hertfordshire County
Council showed that such a strategy would be feasible, but there is sometimes a large
expanse of clear blue water between what is technically feasible and what is
realistically achievable. Would it be easier simply to work out how to upload barcode
data straight into Excel? If so, the flow would then be CALM 4 Excel 4 CALM,
which would make the whole job much quicker, there would be fewer opportunities
for mistakes to creep in, and it would save us the workload of gaining corporate
approval for yet another ICT system. We decided to adopt the second approach, and
we agreed that whatever barcode scanner unit we bought it should be able to export
data in a format which Excel could open.

The second question: do we barcode each item, or each box?

Given the prime driver for us was the move, the answer for us was the box. Quite
apart from the preservation concerns of physically attaching barcodes to individual
documents, it was our overriding objective to use barcodes to control the move. Once
we had moved a box onto its new shelf all we wanted to do was scan the box, not
open it up and scan hundreds of individual items inside. We also realised that a box
 The Barcode Revolution 55

approach would bring other advantages too. For instance, if every document within a
single box has that box’s barcode number on its CALM catalogue record, then the
hitlist created by a simple search of CALM for that number would in fact be a list of
everything in that box. So, CALM could create box lists for us on the fly: very useful
perhaps when we come to do future stock-takes.
We therefore decided that every storage unit would have a barcode. A storage unit
would usually be the box, but it could also be a folder (if that folder was in a drawer
rather than in a box), or it could be a ‘virtual’ storage unit for oversize items like large
volumes or rolled maps, too large to fit into boxes but which nevertheless take up
location space. At the same time we recognise that there could be advantages in
eventually barcoding every individual item in the collections; a development for the
future perhaps.

The third question: by ‘location’ do we mean the box, or the shelf?

The decision to capture location data with barcodes forced us to think through from
scratch the question of just what a location really is. Our unchallenged understanding
of a location had always been the shelf. When one member of staff asks another where
a document is, the anecdotal answer is usually along the lines of ‘it’s in room 3, bay
12, shelf 5.’ Within CALM, we had assumed that a member of staff would call up an
item’s record in the catalogue module, and there they would read ‘‘Room 3 Bay 12’’
actually in the location field on that catalogue record. But this approach can cause
workload problems when many documents are moved, as it means that all the
catalogue records have to be changed too.
Let me explain this in more detail. If there are one thousand individual catalogued
documents on Shelf A, and we move them to Shelf B, then a thousand records in
the catalogue module all need changing. For a move of an entire repository, all the
location information for every single catalogued record – which could run into the
millions – would have to be updated. On the other hand, if the location is actually
the box, and the data in the location field is simply a unique box number, then
nothing needs changing at all. If all those one thousand documents are in ten boxes
on Shelf A, they will still be in those same ten boxes when they have been moved to
Shelf B. No information in the catalogue module has changed at all. Instead, what
changes is the information about where those boxes are stored; information which is
kept in the locations module. So, rather than updating one thousand catalogue
module records we are just updating ten location module records. Much easier and
quicker.
These concepts lie at the very core of our barcoding approach. In summary, every
document is inside a storage unit. Every storage unit has a unique barcode number.
Every barcode number has a record in CALM’s locations module, which contains
information about that storage unit, most importantly the human-readable shelf
address of where it is. It is this barcode number which staff see in the location field in
a document’s record in the catalogue module, and it is this barcode number which
56 A. Akeroyd
forms the link between the catalogue module and the locations module. At
Cambridgeshire all these barcodes begin with A, for Archive, so that a box has a
number along the lines of A1234567.
Now for the clever bit, from the perspective of the move. In order to change
locations quickly within the database we needed a second series of barcodes. These
are shelf barcodes, one for each shelf, and at Cambridgeshire we made sure that
these all began with L, for Location, so that a shelf might have a number like
L54321. A member of staff can use the barcode reader unit to scan the shelf’s L
number followed by all the A numbers of the boxes on that shelf. These numbers
then get imported into Excel using the scanner unit’s own software, and within
Excel we can create a batch of location records for bulk import into CALM. No one
has to use clipboard and paper at all. We realised that the length of our closure
period following the move could be reduced to the amount of time it took to scan
all the barcodes in the new repository, which meant that we could (in theory)
reduce our closure period from months literally down to just a few days. And we
recognised that we had stumbled upon an answer to the ‘misplaced box’ problem.
It did not matter if the removal company placed a box in the wrong place in the
new repository, because the barcode scanner unit would scan it anyway, and so the
database would tell us where it was.
Once we had the theory worked out, we could begin barcoding all of our holdings.
Knowing that our move was two years ahead we buckled down to sort out the
practicalities of scheduling, data input, and management of the biggest project ever
undertaken at County Record Office Huntingdon; nothing less than a complete pass
through the entire repository to associate everything with a barcode no matter
whether it was boxed, unboxed, catalogued or uncatalogued.

Figure 1 An A number barcode. This barcode is stuck directly to the box, folder or
volume wrapper. The human readable version of the number is deliberately large, so that
a barcode on a high shelf can be read by a member of staff standing on the floor.

Figure 2 An L number barcode. This barcode is stuck to the front of the shelf.
 The Barcode Revolution 57

Technicalities
We settled on Code-128 as our barcode symbology. Barcodes created in Code-128
have fewer white and black lines in them than most other symbologies, mainly
because lines are attributed to pairs of digits rather than single digits which reduces
the length of the barcode. The advantage for us is that the barcode can then be quite
big on the label, which means that it can be scanned from further away, which in turn
means that a member of staff can often scan high shelf-level barcodes while still
standing on the floor. The barcode numbers themselves are a simple running
sequence, beginning with A0000001 and carrying on. The number itself means
nothing. At Cambridgeshire we discussed whether the number should be meaningful
in some way, perhaps to reflect the collection or even a document reference number,
in the same way that an ISBN barcode tells us the publisher of a book, but the
drawback of this approach is that when (not if!) a barcode label becomes detached
and lost, the barcode needs to be recreated exactly as it was before. If the number is
meaningless, however, then all we have to do is peel off the next number from the
sheet, stick it on and update the data in CALM. The barcodes themselves were
printed for us in bulk by the same suppliers who provide barcodes for
Cambridgeshire Libraries.3 West Yorkshire decided to print their own barcode labels
using in-house equipment, but likewise adopted the same approach of having
meaningless barcode numbers.
We purchased a Symbol MC1000 handheld barcode reader, which we chose
because it is portable yet robust, and carries keys for manual data input in case an
individual barcode is unreadable. This particular model is no longer on the market
but similar units are easily available. Barcode Warehouse4 installed a simple bespoke
application on the scanner for us, which expects a single L number to be scanned
first, followed by any number of A numbers. The result of a scanning session is a long
sequence of L and A numbers which is then uploaded into a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet. By using lookup tables, Excel can automatically insert a human-readable
shelf address alongside the location L number. The whole location description,
combining both the barcode number and the shelf address, is then imported into
CALM’s location database, so that staff can see where all the items are. The process
sounds long-winded, and would be for just one box, but in a large-scale move it
becomes very efficient.
The true hard work lay in physically going through our collections and associating
a barcode number to everything. At Huntingdon we appointed a packaging assistant
who worked in the strongrooms to ensure that every box, volume, roll and folder
had a barcode, and who repackaged items from unsatisfactory storage into new
standard sized boxes whenever possible. Archivists and archive assistants were then
scheduled to correlate these barcode numbers with the document reference numbers
on our catalogues, and then give the annotated catalogues to dedicated data in-
putters. Following quality assessment on the data, a finished collection was then
scanned, the storage unit data were imported into CALM’s locations module, and the
58 A. Akeroyd

Figure 3 Scanning a barcode. The entire repository was scanned within 48 hours after the
last box was moved in.

document description data were imported into the catalogue module. DS Ltd (now
Axiell) supplied us with a script which enabled us to import barcode numbers into
the location fields of existing CALM catalogue records, which saved us a great deal of
staff data input time.5 We identified 39 separate steps in this entire process, from
identifying a collection as the next one to be barcoded, to seeing it finished and inside
CALM.
Uncatalogued collections were also barcoded and imported into CALM. With no
catalogues to work from and with no specific items to correlate, barcoding these
collections was in practice quite fast. A CALM catalogue module record for an
uncatalogued box might have the title ‘Accession 1234 uncatalogued box no. 21’, and
the description might be as simple as ‘Unsorted deeds’ or similar, but this was
enough for the barcode system to work.
At any one moment different members of staff could be working at different stages
on a variety of different collections, so we realised that we needed a project control
methodology which could cope with tracking all this work, and which could flag
bottlenecks quickly. Customary project management is a line management process, in
which one person reports to another or to a project board, but this process would not
act fast enough to keep up with how the project was progressing. We therefore
adopted the same approach that was used by the RAF during 1940 whenever a
 The Barcode Revolution 59

formation of German bombers was detected flying across the English Channel.
Instead of this information being passed up the lengthy RAF chain of command, it
was reported quickly and directly to a map room, whereupon a plotter moved a
wooden block representing the aircraft. Everyone present in the room could see all
the information with no time delay. This methodology cut out unnecessary layers
of military hierarchy, and allowed the RAF to respond effectively. Instead of a map,
we had an Excel spreadsheet, but the principle was the same, in that the information
on the spreadsheet was guiding the project. The spreadsheet contained a column for
each major stage in the process and a row for each collection or group of collections.
Every member of staff had access to the spreadsheet and updated it daily, thereby
enabling others to see immediately which collections had already been barcoded,
which ones were currently being done, what specific stages they were at, what
packaging had been used, where any problems lay, and where bottlenecks were
occurring.
By the spring of 2009 the project had been completed. The entire project, from
creating the methodology to seeing the last box barcoded, took just over two years,
using existing staff alongside a full-time equivalent (FTE) packaging assistant and a
FTE data inputter. In that time we repackaged and barcoded the best part of a mile of
records. We knew exactly how many boxes we had in each size range, and we planned
the storage at our new repository accordingly. During May the move itself took place,
with the last Pickfords vanload being delivered on Friday 29 May. On Monday 1 June
we commenced scanning the new locations with the barcode scanner unit. We
completed the entire scanning pass, the quality audit on the scanner output, and the
import into CALM, within just two working days, so we could in theory have opened
again to the public on Wednesday. We are hoping this is some kind of record for a
major repository. Certainly we feel that it vindicates our entire barcode approach at
Cambridgeshire.

The value of barcodes

During the Cambridgeshire project we became aware of many advantages of
barcodes, some of which I have already touched on above, namely: we know precisely
how many storage units we have of different types, which helps repository planning;
we can be more efficient with storage, as it is now possible to store the same size
boxes together irrespective of which collection they are from; it is easy to locate a box
that has been mistakenly delivered to the wrong shelf; we can easily create box lists;
and the public closure period for a repository during its move is greatly reduced.
As far as our searchroom staff are concerned, however, barcodes have one
advantage to rule them all: the production of documents has been made easier. The
learning curve for a new archives assistant used to be fairly steep, because location
knowledge was often tied up in people’s heads rather than written down, and
sometimes it would be many months before a new member of staff would become
aware of the overall Gestalt enough to gain that sixth sense of where items might be.
60 A. Akeroyd

Figure 4 The finished result: an entire repository managed by using barcodes within
CALM.

But today all our Huntingdon locations are on the database, and the learning curve is
reduced. A new member of staff only has to learn how to type in a document
reference number, whereupon they can see instantly the barcode number of the box
it is in, where that box is, what sort of box it is, and what else that box contains.
Over time, the Gestalt still forms, and staff are becoming skilled enough to be able to
locate many documents without needing to use the database at all. But that inner
knowledge is no longer necessary for successful document production.
The Cambridgeshire experience therefore demonstrates the value of barcodes in
locating documents and in managing speedy and effective moves. We are now
reflecting on what might be the next stage in our use of barcode-style technologies to
manage archives. The obvious area is production of individual documents within the
searchroom. I am not aware of any UK local authority repository which manages
document productions by scanning individual barcodes each time a document is
produced and then put away. It is possible that some application of radio-frequency
identification (RFID) may be a more suitable way to achieve this.6 Documents only
move between a certain number of defined locations (store, searchroom, workroom,
conservation, or digitisation bureau) and if RFID detectors were placed at the
entrances to all these, in the same way that we all see RFID detectors in shops and
libraries, then it may be possible to track document movements within a building
 The Barcode Revolution 61

without physically having to scan anything at all.7 It will be some years before we can
make a start on anything like this at Cambridgeshire, however, not least because we
have already begun to barcode all our holdings at our Cambridge service point. For
the foreseeable future, our destiny lies with those little white and black lines.

Acknowledgements
The barcoding project at Huntingdon was primarily driven by the efforts of Laura
Ibbett and Richard Anderson, together with a great deal of hard work and thought
from Victoria Bell, Sue Thomas, Ruth Hammond, Esther Bellamy, Sue Kemsley, and
Michelle Irons. Christine May, Head of Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies,
originally envisioned and oversaw the whole project, while my own role was to work
out the methodology, manage the project, and organise the move. Many other staff
were involved along the way, especially Lesley Akeroyd and Alexa Cox, archivists at
Huntingdon. In addition to Alexandra Eveleigh and Geoffrey Edwards mentioned
earlier, I would like to thank Malcolm Howitt and his colleagues at Axiell, Chris
Heaton of Cambridgeshire Libraries, and many individuals within Cambridgeshire
County Council’s corporate ICT team, especially James Merriman, for supporting
CALM and the barcode project, and for making productive suggestions along the
way.

Notes
[1] I am grateful to Alexandra Eveleigh of WYAS and Geoffrey Edwards of GRO for their
knowledge and assistance.
[2] Prior to 2006 there was certainly little discussion about using barcodes within archive
repositories despite barcodes having been existence for over a quarter of a century. A search of
the archives of the archives-nra email list which we carried out in late 2006 revealed only one
post on the subject, from Glamorgan Record Office in March 2005, asking if anyone else could
advise on preparing specifications for a repository move which involved such a system. Records
management systems are more likely to use barcodes, but in 2006 the Cambridgeshire County
Council records management service did not use them. A records management-based barcode
solution would have involved the purchase of new RM software, which was a route we did not
want to pursue. We had only just purchased CALM and so we were looking for a CALM-based
solution.
[3] Because we were attaching barcode labels to boxes or labels we did not worry about the sort of
adhesion used. If anything, the glue has been too light, as some barcodes have begun to peel
away over time, but we foresaw this issue when we were setting up the barcode methodology
and it was one of the reasons why we chose indirect rather than direct numbers.
[4] Barcode Warehouse, http://www.thebarcodewarehouse.co.uk/ (accessed 18 December 2009).
We approached Barcode Warehouse with a brief specification of the output we required from
the scanning unit, and staff at Barcode Warehouse themselves identified the best scanner for
our purpose. The scanning unit then had to be approved under corporate DIT compliance
testing prior to connection with the corporate network.
[5] Axiell Ltd, http://www.axiell.com/welcome (accessed 18 December 2009). A little more detail
about the work Axiell carried out may be of help here. It is not usually possible to automate the
insertion of data into fields within already-existing records in a CALM database. For instance, if
62 A. Akeroyd
you know the box barcode numbers for a couple of thousand records, and you want to insert
the correct number into the Location field for each catalogued document, then you would have
to find that record in CALM, manually type in the barcode number, and then find the next
record, two thousand times. Clearly we needed a faster way to input these numbers. Axiell’s
script enabled us to type up a simple Excel spreadsheet, with the reference numbers in one
column and the barcode numbers in another, and then import this into CALM in one go. The
script then carried out the mundane work of searching the database, finding the correct record,
and inserting the barcode. When the script had finished running it generated an error log
which listed all the problems it had encountered along the way, such as barcodes for items
which did not seem to exist on the database. Staff time could then be more valuably spent in
resolving these issues.
[6] An RFID tag combines an antenna and an integrated circuit which contains information about
the item to which the tag is attached. The technology is becoming more common in UK
libraries because, unlike a barcode, an RFID tag can be scanned without the book having to be
opened at all. This can be used to implement self-service book issue in libraries, and in fact
Huntingdon Library was one of the first in Cambridgeshire to introduce an RFID self-issue
system for customers. This advantage of RFID is largely irrelevant in the context of an archive
store, however, where the majority of barcodes are in plain sight on the front of boxes, and can
quickly be read by a handheld scanning unit. Barcodes are a simpler and cheaper way to
capture information about large quantities of units which are in static locations. RFID, how-
ever, is an excellent tool for tracking items which are on the move, and so it has some potential
as a tool for document productions.
[7] Any project which seriously intends to barcode or apply RFID to individual documents would
need to take into account the sheer number of documents involved. At Huntingdon, the mean
average number of documents per box (ie. the number of packaging units divided by the
number of catalogued items on CALM) is about ten, so a project to barcode documents would
take ten times as long as a project to barcode boxes. One solution to this would be to apply
permanent RFID only to documents as and when they are produced.
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