RFID Standards Update

Just came across the PPT of Vinod Chachra's presentation at ALA-Seattle (PDF here) in which he summarizes what is going on with the NISO Standards Committee on Library Applications of RFID.

His slides are detailed enough that you can pretty much make sense of what's happening and I'm happy to say there's a bit more going on that I would have thought. The best news is that the group has established four levels of interoperability that they are concerned about and they are roughly described as compatibility within the library, within the community, for ILL and for the supply chain.

Interoperability Level One: Within the Library
Addresses the fear that tags may not be useful or available in the future requiring expensive and time-consuming retagging. Suggestions include standardization of tags and data on tags and interoperability of tags from different manufacturers.

Interoperability Level Two: Within the Community
Addresses the issue of library tags being read by non-library readers or non-library tags being read by library readers. The group is recommending adopting the Application Family Identifier (AFI) to address this issue.

Interoperability Level Three: ILL Purposes
The concept here is that a tag from library A should be able to service the circulation needs of Library B. This requires a standard data model for all tags.

Interoperability Level Four: Supply Chain
Tags should be being applied as high up in the supply chain as possible so they can be used by the manufacturer, distributor, book jobber and libraries. Requires standards to be normalized for each party in that supply chain.

A final report from the NISO Working Group is due in June of 2007. That's progress!