Tape Tracking System

Working, as I do, for a leading provider of in-room entertainment and internet services for hotels in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, I am called upon to handle a very large number of videotapes going to a large number of destinations each month. Once the tapes have been used, they must be returned to our offices and their serial numbers marked off, to assure the movie studios that all copies are accounted for. When I first started working for this company, our records were entirely paper-based, and the various systems we had inherited from previous mergers used incompatible forms and folders to record tape locations. Attributing an orphaned tape from a broken vcr could be extremely time-consuming, with thousands of tapes a month going in or out.
I spoke with my manager about the possibility of using a barcoding system to track our stock, much like a video rental store. He obliged with an inexpensive "pen" reader called the CueCat

CueCat Barcode Reader

This connects to a ps/2 keyboard port and when scanned across a bar code, the numbers are effectivley "typed" into the pc. This makes it quite easy to write a database application to record the barcodes scanned.
I sat down with a pen and paper and applied some of my old university training to devise a data organisation scheme. Once I had figured out which information needed to be stored and where, I got to work writing code for my tape tracking system.
I used Macromedia Director to make the program, as it is easy to use for graphical applications, and has built-in commands for saving and loading data files.

Tape Tracking System

I'm unsure of the legal aspects of mentioning the company name on a private blog, so I've blurred it out of these pictures. If you want to know which in-room entertainment company I work for, it's a major one.
The buttons dynamically resize and move as the mouse pointer rolls over them.

Buttons Grow and Shrink

Each hotel is given a codename of up to 9 characters, and to assign tapes to a hotel, the user selects the name from a drop-down list.

Selecting Destination

The allocated set of tapes is then scanned and their serial numbers are added to the list of tapes already at that location.

Scanning Tapes Out

After a month or two, these movies will be replaced by new ones, and the tapes will be sent back to us. It is at this time that the barcoding system is particularly useful, as sometimes our interstate contractors can be somewhat careless packing the tapes, and put unsorted sets from different hotels together. This would be very hard to sort out using the old paper system, but the computer can tell us straight away where a tape has been.

Scanning Tapes In

The returned tapes are removed from the on-screen list. There are a variety of ways to use the information in the database, from simply scanning a single tape to see where it has come from, to generating a variety of reports for importing into Microsoft Excel.

Report of Tapes Out in May

The "Hotel Report" can be set for one hotel or across all hotels. A complete grid of movie titles and their quantities at each hotel can also be exported with the "Tape Report" option.
Each month, I print out a set of barcoded labels with the cheap and cheerful Labels Unlimited software, and stick the labels to the new tapes.

Shelf full of tapes

My special program runs on a K6-II PC operating at 350MHz, with Windows 98. This rather unimpressive spec is still quite enough to allow for speedy scanning, and I regularly backup the data files to a network drive.

Barcode PC and AV Setup

The VCRs and TVs pictured are used for testing new tapes as they come in. This image also shows my special custom-built MP3 player Dock, which serves as both a music system and the speaker for the barcode "ding" sound effects as I scan.

A Particularly Ghetto Piece of Equipment

This cardboard speaker box is paired with a second one hidden below the vcr shelf, and the whole setup cost about $5. Sound quality is surprisingly good, at least at the sort of volumes one can use in a workplace. I have been offered some proper speakers, but I've grown quite attached to these.

Hotel Barcodes

I use this printout of hotel names with associated barcodes so that I may work away from the keyboard when scanning lots of stock. I simply scan each hotel name to switch the destination for the next stack of tapes.
Using this barcoding system has saved me enormous amounts of time, allowing me to concentrate more on the interesting parts of my job like graphic design and video editing.