Hello all,

The company I work for takes digital images of old historical documents and other media (microfilm, fiche, newspapers, books etc.). The content we receive can either be purchased by the company or on loan from an offsite vendor. For tracking purposes we assign barcodes to all content received. Currently we use address labels as a means to print barcodes on. Since we are taking pictures of the content, we cannot adhere the address labels directly to the content since this will be visible in the images that we capture. Instead, we wrap the content with paper bands and adhere the address labels to the paper bands. Those who capture the digital images have to remove the paper labels, then take the pictures, and subsequently re-wrap the content with the paper bands. It is my feeling that this is a bit messy and I'd like to find another way to barcode our content. We need to preserve the current barcode system we have since it is built into our system. Barcodes consist of a 6 digit number pre-generated from a tracking spreadsheet.

An option I had considered was printing barcodes on clear address labels using fluorescent ink and scanning via UV barcode scanners. The issue I'm dealing with however is that at times we need to visually determine which content item is which and therefore a visible barcode number is necessary. As noted previously though, having anything visible such as a barcode number is not permissible in our digital images. Hopefully you can see the issue I've run into.

Any ideas on how I can attach nearly invisible barcodes to physical content while also allowing for the possibility of visible barcode numbers?