At last week's Bibliothekartag in Erfurt, Germany, at the end of a talk by Regina Pfeifenberger of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin on designing mobile library sites (great talk, by the way, and made me think that everyone needs a mobile site by 2010), Jin Tan of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin did a short riff on QR tags and their uses for libraries. One can read the Wikipedia page to get the full scoop on QR tags, but in a nutshell what they do is present textual information in a barcode format readable by machines.
How does it work? People with QR enabled devices (iPhones, various Blackberry, Samsung,
Nokia phones, etc.) can snap a picture of the code, which is then
converted by software on their device into the textual information. No
typing, no processing, just snap and it's done. It can be a URL, plain
text, a phone number, a YouTube stream, an eBay ID, or just about
anything else. Neat, but what can one do? Lot of things, for example:
- On a poster advertising an event, tuck a QR code with all of the details in the corner.
- On the library hours sign, tuck the hours in a QR code and let users get the full scoop with one photo.
- Generate QR codes on the fly from the catalog and let users pick up call numbers simply by taking a picture (no fee, as can occur with texting from the catalog).
The possibilities are endless, and it is quick and easy to generate a QR code. Just google "create QR code" to see the number of sites offering free services.
One of the more whimsical uses of QR tags is the wearable QR code. Jin Tan had a t-shirt on with his business card embedded in a QR code. Take a picture of his shirt, and networking has happened. Slick!
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