Makelabels: a Bash script for generating data matrix codes for collection management

Digitization of natural history collections allows easy access and reuse of the invaluable biodiversity data held within a collection by providing access to specimen level data through the Internet. Each digitized specimen in a database requires a unique catalog number to distinguish it from the many other biologically unique specimens within the collection. However, there are few open source barcode generators available, and of these even fewer platforms exist to enable the mass production of barcode labels required by natural history collections. We developed a low-cost, open source solution to generating data matrix barcodes with unique catalog numbers for use in the Virginia Tech Insect Collection.

Here we describe the makelabels script, which uses the open source Unix packages libdmtx and ImageMagick to generate unique specimen labels containing both a human-readable catalog number and a machine-readable data matrix barcode. The mass production of labels and use of both types of catalog symbology provides flexibility in specimen management and increased efficiency in digitization and specimen processing workflows.