Blog posts tagged with RFID

Once your library decides to transition to RFID, one of the first things you have to consider is integration with library management system (LMS aka ILS) and your RFID system. Basic check-out on your self-check machines will probably work just dandy regardless of your RFID/LMS vendors because these communications are usually based on SIP2. But as soon as you get into any advanced functionality (e.g. fee payment, account management) on the self-checks and especially when you get into the functionality of the staff client, it all goes to hell.

If you are going to ALA in Chicago, you might want to take advantage of free consulting from one of the 15-20 consultants that will be providing free consulting sessions during the Consultants Give Back session.  

Find the consultant who can help you at /.  If you find someone with the right skills for your project, contact them and make an appointment ahead of time. There are some drop-in options but most of the consultants require appointments.

If you haven't signed that RFID contract yet, you may want to set down your pen and check one thing....is the chip in your vendor's RFID tag capable of locking and password-protecting your content as well as the AFI and EAS registers?  If not, don't sign that contract.  Here's why....

One of my clients, Salt Lake City Library, is kicking some RFID tagging booty!  They are tagging in teams of two using 3M Conversion Stations.  While most of the team of averaging about 300 items tagged per hour, one of their energizer bunny teams (not surprisingly from the Children's Department) hit the 650 books in an hour mark.  Very impressive!

And if you always wondered what it means to RFID tag your collection, check out these great little videos.

I just got back from attending my first NCIP Standing Committee meeting at OCLC headquarters in Dublin, Ohio.  It turned out to be a far better experience than I could have imagined. The people working on this committee are dedicated to making NCIP the "go-to" protocol for communications with the ILS/LMS. My objective going there was to possibly challenge that idea insofar as my intention was to introduce them to the Library Communcation Framework (LCF) - a protocol being developed in the U.K. by people who aspire to make LCF the library "go-to" protocol.

 I have just returned from the UK, where I spoke at the RFID in Libraries Conference.  While there, I met with representatives from the Book Industry Communications (BIC) and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) as well as RFID vendors. BIC and CILIP are two UK entities roughly equivalent (very roughly) to the BISG (Book Industry Study Group) and ALA.

Now that we have a national data model, namely ISO 28560-2, it is incumbent on libraries to figure out what to do with it.  Given that there are 24 data elements defined in the data model, only two of which are mandatory (Primary Item ID aka barcode and Tag Content Key), how does the library decide which of those optional 22 it will use?

I recently participated in a discussion about how to deal with patrons who are nervous about the health effects of RFID.  We all know RFID is harmless, right? My answer is that if you are concerned about EMF (electomagnetic radiation exposure), then library RFID tags should be the least of your worries. Notice that I'm not saying RFID is harmless...

I've suggested many times that somewhere along the way, we are going to need to find a way to test the encoding of our RFID tags.  Now that we have a US Data Model, libraries need to be able to ensure that their encoded tags comply with ISO 28560-2.  At this point, the only company that I know of that can do such a thing is Convergent Software (out of the UK).