AIM Global, the industry association, has been actively studying the use of barcodes as a backup to RFID. AIM Global noted this in a recent newsletter article about barcodes to back up RFID:

Every business needs a backup plan -- whether it's for critical IT applications, customer information, inventory or other mission-critical data. It's no different with bar code and RFID data. Bar codes and RFID tags can be damaged in transit or handling. Recovering the data from these machine-readable codes is essential.

Bar codes have traditionally relied on a human readable interpretation (HRI) of the data in a bar code. For RFID, however, the answer is not necessarily as straightforward. * * *

To address the need to recover EPC data from a damaged tag, AIM's RFID Experts Group (REG) has developed a guideline for the use of bar codes for RFID backup.

The article linked to above goes on to describe methods for getting 96 zeroes and ones into a human readable form for use as a critical backup -- not an easy task.

The guidelines put together by AIM Global's Experts Group will be published on the AIM Global website by the end of April 2006.

Hat tip to Chris Kapsambelis, a guest contributor here at the RFID Weblog, for pointing out the AIM Global link. Check out Chris's related-topic guest post: Barcode to Backup RFID Data.