RFID Asset Tracking 

Artwork Management

The Edith Cowan University Art Collection is a dynamic, constantly evolving reflection of the best in Australian and Western Australian art. It is built on a strong philosophical commitment to integrating art into the everyday experience of students, staff and the wider community and fostering and promoting local art practice. The University achieves these aims by exhibiting its more than 3,500 works in public spaces across its four campuses, making it one of Australia's most accessible, and difficult to manage, collections.

The logistics involved in this is quite daunting. Artworks can be in storage, in transit or on display in any one of dozens of locations.

Connie Petrillo, Art Collection Curator, needed a better way to manage this valuable but, widely dispersed asset. She approached APC Integration who developed a system based on the Nordic ID PL300 handheld computer with RFID capability and their Asset Tracker, asset management application.

The advantage of RFID over bar-coded labels is that the RFID labels (which are allied to the back of artworks) can be read without manhandling the work off the wall. Larger works, in particular will often require two people to remove.