RF I DO!

Mary A. Kelly and

Derek Engi

Salem-South Lyon District LibraryImagine the Possibilities!

RFID-What is it?

• RFID is used to describe systems that use radio waves to identify objects

• Think of it as a barcode on steroids

Barcodes

• Fixed information

• Data security• Limited data• Line of sight

only• One at a time

RFID

• No Line of sight necessary

• Tags can be read in the vicinity of a reader

• Modification of data possible

• Can read multiple tags at once

RFIDWhat is involved?

RFID is basically two pieces:

Tags

Reader(interrogator)

Salem-South Lyon’s RFID Project

• 65,000 items beginning October 2004

• 11 months to retrofit collection (done in-house)

• All staff contributed to retrofit project

• 10-15 high school volunteers

Why spend an obscene amount of money, a year retrofitting a collection, dealing with yet another technology issue for staff to complain about and generally make one’s professional life a nightmare?

Security

• The most visible part and biggest selling point of RFID

• Think of combining the power of tattletape with your ILS

• Less intrusive to the public

• Proven technology

Self Check-out

• Patron convenience

• Less time and staffing needed for circulation

Other time savings with RFID

• Faster discharge• Faster checkout• Automation of routine

circulation tasks• Inventory management

Inventory Wand

• Collects information quickly without “heavy lifting”

• Brings your ILS to the material rather than material to ILS

The Inventory Wand• Allows for any criteria from

your ILS or master shelf list to load into the system

• Wave the wand close to the collection

• With practice, staff can pass the wand over one full stack in less than a minute (30 items on a shelf, 6 shelves).

Making RFID go to 11!

FDS

• Functional Data and Statistics• RFID / PHP / MySQL / Python• Passively gathers checkpoint

data from circuit readers and self-check

• Pre-Director Station• No ILS? No Problem!• Shelflist

FDS

• Functional Data and Statistics

FDS

Inventory Control

• All things accounted for in real time

• RFID collects and processes information faster

• Each item is identified so theoretically, no missing items

• Shelf order maintenance

Collection Quality and RFID

• Identify your hot sellers• Get more copies• Buy more of the same genre

or author

• Identify the losers• Is the topic a dud or is it the

material or format?• Re-evaluate investment of

collection money

Collection Quality and RFID

• Staff time on collection management is reduced

• Weeding can be done in minutes

• Number of missing books reduced

• Reduction in number of miss-filings

Salem-South Lyon District Library

• Before RFID, we had over 2,000 missing items

• On the first serious day with the inventory wand we found over 100 items missing

• Current missing list is less than 700

Salem-South Lyon District Library

• Identified mislabeled items

• Identified misshelved items

• Weeding and other collection maintenance tasks are on-going rather than sporadic

WHAMS

• RFID / PHP / MySQL based PC registration

• Really simple, keeps track of stats

Whams

Things I wish I had known before implementing RFID• Weed ruthlessly• If you are putting a tag on

something, take the extra time and do a complete physical inventory of the collection

• Staff buy-in and communication is more important than you think

For more information

• Visit the us at: http://salemsouthlyonlibrary.info

Email us: mary@salemsouthlyonlibrary.info

dengi@salemsouthlyonlibrary.info