Today is the last day of the Aleph (Library Management System) part of the conference. Tomorrow and Friday is dedicated to the SFX and MetaLib products.

Anyway, the first session today is about RFID. Firstly Jo Rademakers from K.U.Leuven is speaking about their experience using RIFD. The driver seems to have been coping with longer opening hours on limited staff.

Currently they are using RFID for issue and security for items (although not all journal issues are tagged). They haven’t yet put in return machines, but they are doing that this week.

I’m really excited about the possibilities of RFID, although it is more impressive in the flesh (as it were), than listening to talks about it. However, it has the ability to deliver a great self-service user experience in the good old physical library.

One issue that they came across in K.U.Leuven was that there are no links between the RFID activation equipment and the library system. This means that careful workflows need to be constructed. I think that LMS vendors need to catchup here. Although the user side works well (making use of the SIP2 protocol), the library staff side seems to be less well thought through.

Now someone from Denmark is talking about their aims with RFID – in the future, they are thinking of is:

Replacement of materials by robot
Internet addresses encoded in the tag which can take you to more information when scanned
Intelligent shelf – self sorting, shelf lists, warnings when an item is mishelved, automated shelf indicators at the end of shelving bays.
Gate based lending and returning of materials – so that items are automatically issued when you leave the library with it.
‘Fairytale cave’ – for children. An area of the library for children, and when they take a book into the area the tag is read, and illustrations of the story are shown, or an audio version of the book is played!

However – these possibilities are not necessarily cheap. Also, the key use for now is self-issue. Within a couple of months of implementing they had gone to 90% loans done by self-issue – that is pretty impressive.

They are taking advantage of the reduction in routine work to start staff development and qualifications.

Some questions from me – is anyone using RFID to do batch processing of books? I’m not talking about batch issue and return, but things like batch status changes (change all these items to short loan), batch arrivals (box of books arrives from supplier and all ‘arrived’ on system automatically)? Also, is there any use of RFID for non-circulation/stock management issues – e.g. acquisitions, serials check-in?