Some mundane but interesting points from the final speaker in this section.

When you are buying tags you need to think about lots of little things – the printing, the adhesive being used (water content and acidity/alkalinity). The method that the chip is connected to the antenna – if you use glue, you can find that the chip becomes loose when the chip gets hot – the alternative methods are ‘flip’ and ‘cross over’ – the latter is the ‘best’, with higher temperature resistance, and faster reading, and more reliable connections.

Copper or Aluminium antenna.

You need to decide which standard you use – ISO 15693 or ISO 18000-3 (he recommends the former as better for library use). You need to get the correct version of the chip (he suggests Phillips SLI), you need to think about the ‘capacity’ of the chip – he recommends at least 32 bit, and ideally 64 bit.

This is bringing home to me the fact that we are still in very early days – I knew that there were competing standards, but there are still a lot of problems, and there seems a likelihood that any choice at the moment will mean being tied to a single vendor. This may not be a problem, but something to bear in mind.

I’m finding it hard to get very excited about all these details, but there is no doubt that the speaker is thinks they are very important – and I’m sure he is absolutely right. You don’t want to make the wrong decision on a large scale in this area. However, generally the speaker is saying – don’t skimp on the quality of the tag to save on price – you get what you pay for.