For many Art enthusiasts and museum artifacts collectors, whether they maintain small or large collections, it is very difficult to count, manage and protect their art collection especially if it is spread across many countries. This task can be manageable utilizing a web based RFID Art Tracking application, a variety of RFID technologies and the Internet.
Why RFID as opposed to barcode? One of the many benefits of RFID, is that you don’t have to disturb the environment of the items you’re counting, because RFID typically will read right through the items you’re counting. As an example, you can mount the RFID Tag behind a piece of Art, or possibly within a Vase, or put the tag inside clothing, and read those tags right through the respective materials.
Depending on the implementation, two types of systems can be used:
Passive short range Technology–with Passive short range technology a person reading the tags will need to be around 10 to 20 feet of the Inventory when counting with a PDA. Additionally, the system supports UHF Portal technology; hence you can see inventory items as they pass by these Portals.
Active long range Technology–with Active long range technology there is no need for any human intervention–essentially the Tags can either send out a message to a long range reader that basically says the asset is still where its’ supposed to be, or we also have “response technology” where the system can Poll the many sites for an inventory count. Furthermore, and most importantly the Active Technology has immediate alerts such as “motion sense”–as soon as someone touches a very valuable item, the system sends an immediate alert.
Immediate benefit of such a system is productivity gain. Time saved is a direct result of not having to manage the art, artifacts, and the reading hundreds of tags in seconds. Imagine the time savings as opposed to using either barcode technology, or paper and pencil.
Browser based technology for such RFID Art Tracking applications means that you can run the system literally anywhere in the world, you can view data from anywhere, no messy CD’s to load, no more updates for all the PC’s that run the application, and no more updates for the local database.
