RFID Update - Sort of

Don Wood put up a post entitled RFID in Libraries: Privacy and Technical and Managerial Aspects which highlights some useful RFID resources including the PowerPoint slides from Jim Lichtenberg's presentation at ALA (2006). Jim does a nice overview of where we are with RFID in libraries from the book publisher perspective. Thankfully, he states that the key to successfully deploying RFID in libraries lies in the development of standards. Hooray. He quotes the NISO RFID Technical Committee which states:

"It is important for any RFID standard for libraries to focus on the key requirements for interoperability interoperability, while allowing for differences between solutions that foster healthy competition in the marketplace, ...and to allow for the development of more advanced
solutions as technology evolves."

He's got a couple interesting slides about the diffusion of new technology which tends to follow a bell curve as follows:

innovators (2.5%)
early adopters (13.5%)
early majority (34%)
late majority (34%)
laggards (16%)

I believe he puts us in the early adopters phase, which makes sense to me. And again, the key to moving beyond this point is all about the standards. RFID only makes sense for libraries when we have standards that ensure interoperability and ongoing development.

I was pleased to see that Don linked to one of my articles on RFID but rather than linking to my position paper (which is pretty old already, date August 2004), I'd rather he linked to my RFID Backgrounder (April, 2006). Even that is getting old....time to get something even more current on my resources page, eh?