Lynne,

Would you be surprised if people had already done this? Um, maybe you would be. I spent lots of time tracking down "industry solutions." Lets see, have you ever seen barcodes on single screws or transistors? How about inside jars of pickles? Guess what, most of the barcode solutions are for box size, dry, replicably shaped "things". Sure, they make specialized solutions: for a cost. For two years I subscribed to a magazine: ID Systems, looking for reasonable bar code solutions for specimen jars and small material. For the most part, they simply don't exist. The paper is wrong, the ink is wrong, the market is geared toward a different kind of operation.

Who is "we"? Do you think that somebody else can write functional specifications for loan and tranaction management for biological collections? Do you think somebody else will? Have you actually looked at the only close model that we might adopt from an industry similar to ours (libraries)? Or do you think we somehow are in the pet food industry or whatever? Where are we going to buy off the shelf solutions? (Don't give me the old saw about Paradox or dbase, those aren't applications, they are development environments). Can you name somebody else we can get our solutions from?