QR code- Future of CV’s and Business cards?

The first time I came across this was when I went to Brooklyn museum, NY looking for Red Dragon by William Blake. The painting wasn’t there and where it should have been was this funny looking black and white square that gave instruction to scan it with I-phone. I already had a scanner on my phone for scanning normal barcodes and thanks to museum’s free WI-FI I was taken to a page on the museum’s website saying something about the painting not available to public viewing  (No it wasn't eaten by Ralph Fiennes like in Red Dragon –the movie, well I hope not anyway) I was quite disappointed but fascinated by this new technology. I tried to recreate what I saw, I had to shorten the URL using Bitly beforehand, if you haven’t used it before it’s very handy: https://bitly.com/

I noticed loads of them dotted around the museum that gave extra information and trivia facts about different pieces kept there, which were really useful.

23Things gave clear instructions on how to create one. I went on the websites recommended and tried them out, but I also found one: http://www.qrstuff.com/ that you could customise it to a degree. I was also deceived by one on the App shop called Qrafter, which was a total rip off! I was under the impression that for £1.99 it will let you do a lot of customising but it only had a limited number of colour changes and that was that. So try and avoid that one.

I might try Photoshop when I have more time on my hand to customise one for myself.

Like everything else it has got its good points and bad points:

It’s free and incredibly easy to create and use

It could save us a lot of paper and space; It’s the future of CV’s, business cards, flyers, posters, and even information plaques in libraries/museums/historical places etc…

Put one of these on the back of your business card and the recipient can have access to your entire portfolio/cv and contact details .

I can see it being very useful in the music industry especially for new bands. In my days we used to produce single cd-s and hand them out in pubs/nightclubs so people can have a taste of our music. But stick one of these on a flyer and you would save yourself tons of money.

One of the downsides of it is that it’s in the danger of being over-used. It has still got some novelty and our curiosity would lead us to scan the random ones we see occasionally, but imagine if we keep seeing them everywhere, eventually we are going to stop caring and they will lose their functionality

In case of Library I think we can make great use of it. In case of Journals we could use them  in Level 1 to lead people to the link on TDNET or maybe even the actual journal’s URL. In course collection on each course box we could have one leading people to the articles that have been digitised for that course code.

Instead of printing hand-outs and instruction leaflets for Microfilm readers/printers/money loaders/scanners we could have one of these codes that will tell people everything they need to know.

I had lots of fun scanning other library bloggers’ ones to see where they would take me and there were some interesting ones there.

Here’s another one I made for my blog: