DCHAS-L Discussion List Archive
From: Jeffrey Lewin <jclewin**At_Symbol_Here**MTU.EDU>
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] Capturing chemical container information via computer
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 08:52:36 -0400
Reply-To: DCHAS-L <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**MED.CORNELL.EDU>
Message-ID: CAEwQnqi-BkXBPZVeuQy+5w0Y3NYkXCSg+U6qcdJ-vGxeKqE7rg**At_Symbol_Here**mail.gmail.com
In-Reply-To
I recently discovered our MSDS-online (sic) account allows us to download a QR reader app that interacts with their database and to print out QR labels for chemicals. While initially excited about the option, implementation appears to be more difficult:
Note I only spent about 30 minutes working with this so I may have overlooked some things.
Downloading the app from Google Play was simple, login in a breeze and operation relatively straight forward.
The bigger difficulty is on the labeling side. Of course you first have to print out and apply the labels. With thousands of chemicals in our inventory, that will/would be pretty labor intensive.
A bigger issue I had was actually selecting and printing out labels. The label creation tool is set up to print on various Avery labels, a plus. However, from what I could tell it only had QR versions for chemicals in which the (M)SDS was GHS compliant so if they hadn't updated it yet in their data base, no label. Also, it wasn't very straight forward to select multiple chemicals and print out "batch" labels. Once I figured out how to print out the batch label of all the various bottles of an individual chemical (for what I thought was a location I selected) it printed out the labels for chemicals in other location I wasn't interested in...I got a bunch of labels for chemistry rather than biology...
On the app side there is some positive to the system. I was able to scan the QR codes with my phone (I didn't actually attach them to a bottle, just scanned my printout) and it does appear to allow you to quickly manipulate the database.
Of course if the bottle just came with QR codes on them in an open source format we wouldn't have to fool around with printing at all...just scan the code and quickly update the database for location and we'd be all set.
Jeff
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