Barcodes in their various guises are simple technologies that have had a profound impact on inventory management in many industries. However, they have seen little use by biological taxonomists outside a few niche areas. What has been lacking is a simple way to generate and read these codes without costly barcode printers and scanning technology. Today I stumbled across a system that could solve all this - and a few other problems. Kaywa Reader is a simple piece of software that exploits the camera feature of my mobile phone to read information encoded into a two-dimensional (2D) barcode. The reader installs on many modern mobile phones (including my Nokia N91) and instantly reads "Quick Response" (QR) 2D barcodes. These coded symbols can contain several dozen to several hundred times more information than a conventional barcode. They have a very small footprint enabling them to be attached to tiny specimens or microscope slides (there is even a Micro QR-Code available), and depending on what is encoded, can be "interpreted" by the reader software. For example, the code symbol shown on this page encodes the URL of this blog entry. If you run your reader over it (such as my mobile phone), the readers web browser will open this web page in your device. You can also encode phone numbers or SMS messages in these codes, and obviously any kind of text. This has enormous potential for the management of physical objects (specimens, books, reprints, DNA samples etc) in Natural History collections.

1. A compatible mobile phone
2. The Kaywa Reader software

Once installed just start the program and wave the phone over a QR-Code (see some example codes). The software automatically locks on to the code symbol just like a supermarket checkout reader so you don't even have to press a button. There is plenty of software for writing these codes though I couldn't find much for the Mac. However, I don't see why these codes in principle couldn't be created on the fly over the web. For example, check out the QR-Code Generator by Kaywa. Libqrencode is a C library that might be called to do this for a WebApp.