End of Fin Year - and End of Old Life

Ok, tomorrow marks the start of the new financial year, and I am sort of looking at it as also being the start of the lead up to a new start for me.

Well the first 1/2 of this year has been a bit of a roller coaster for me, had lots of ups and downs, but I think the second 1/2 will see the ride smooth out a little... then 2009 will be 2000 and mine!

So updates on whats happening in my world:
The me/Sean situation... is coming close to being resolved and now we seemed to have agreed on exactly what will work and are going through the processes to have it legalized.

We are going to see our place, and I am looking to rent a place close by to where I am now. I am happy with the area, its close enough to work so I figure why go elsewhere if I am happy where I am. With renting, I will be paying less than I am in mortgage payments, and in the long term it gives me more flexibility to move to follow job opportunities. So if anyone is looking for a nice little place in Caroline Springs, keep your eyes peeled!

Another reason for the move is I came to the conclusion, that it will force me to have a new start. Despite not knowing exactly where I will be living soon... I am strangely excited and looking forward to it.

Health kick front - I have gotten a little lazy at late, as it has been too bloody cold and/or wet... but still determined to make a good go of it when the Gym opens in the coming months.

On the work front, my project work down at Sunshine has been extended until the 1st of November, when it will be re-evaluated. While we did reach and complete the project goal of building a new website for the library service well on time and budget, we are now going to focus on improving what we have done and adding lots of extra cool features that were on our wish list, but were not the highest priorities in the original project.

This means I am still only working at Sydenham Library on Mondays and Thursdays, then at Library Administration in Sunshine for the remainder of the week. This is except for a month from August, when I will be acting branch manager while my boss goes on a holiday abroad. I am sure I will need to watch and study Frances O'Brien very hard to see how to do the job properly. During that time I will be based at Sydenham full time again.

On the love life front... well - hello I have been talking about work - so nothing really to announce at the moment.

Reprogramming

Well I have been neglecting the old blog as of late, so I thought I better do a post to keep it alive!

This week at Sydenham Library we have been undertaking a process to reprogramme the RFID tags in our entire collection for use with our new 3M RFID solution.

For those who are not from the Library world - RFID is Radio Frequency Identification - and is a modern day solution to replace barcodes with microchips which can transmit a book or DVDs unique barcode number through a radio frequency. In an RFID solution, each 'item' is tagged with an RFID tag, a sticker basically around 4 cm X 4cm. This tag acts like a disk, and can hold information you program into it, which in most libraries case is the unique barcode number used to identify the item to the libraries catalogue system.

Why would we want to do this in Libraries? Well there are a number of benefits to using RFID as opposed to barcodes. These include:

• With RFID you do not need to line the tag up to an exact position above its readers, as you do a barcode. This means there is less moving items about reducing manual handling injuries such as RSI. This also means that the efficiency of tasks such as borrowing and returning is faster.
• Unlike barcodes where you can only read one barcode at a time on a scanner, an RFID reader pad can read multiple RFID tags at once as it does not require line of site - once again reducing the time it takes to borrow and return items.
• Because of its ease of use, RFID helps make self-service solutions easier for library customers to use. Self-service means less loans are handled by librarians, freeing them up to perform other duties and giving them more time to organise and deliver other value added services to their customers.

Sydenham Library already had an RFID solution in place, but with the introduction of the 3M solution to the Sunshine Library which is also part of the same library service, the 3M system has been extended to Sydenham now to maintain consistency across the library service. Why then if we already had RFID do we need to reprogram all our tags you may ask?

With RFID even though the theory and equipment behind most solutions is roughly the same, the difference can lay in where abouts on an RFID tag the item barcode is stored. If you think of an RFID tag as like a big square of pigeon holes, with each hole being able to hold a single piece of information. For example our tag might look like:

1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

now lets say our barcode numbers are 3 numbers long. Solution A might store the barcode number in slot 1,2 & 3... where solution B might store the barcode in slots 7,8, and 9. So with our reprogramming process we are moving all the information stored on our tags to a position where the new 3M system is looking for it!

We started reprogramming at the start of the week, and as of last night pretty much only had our children's and AV collection left to reprogram, so the reprogramming task is rather fast and should hopefully be finished by either late this week, or early next week!

Well I know this was a boring post, but I just felt I had to post something!