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!