I'm not an RFID expert by a long shot, but we do use it here at CSU Channel Islands and I had to learn a lot about it quickly because all our stuff broke and I had to fix it.
In that process, I had heard that while RFID's great for public libraries (where they're circulating enough that staff time is problematic as is material theft), academic libraries don't love it, particularly for security (which RFID is pretty bad at actually). I've heard of a few academic libraries that have abandoned RFID for security because it's just not worth maintaining (i.e., cost of stuff stolen versus costs of time, materials etc. to maintain the tags in the collection). However, hopefully this audience knows that there's more to RFID than security and self-check (like automated materials handling, collection inventory and this other stuff, I wouldn't call it augmented reality - probably because I have the same reaction that Chris had to that phrase - but maybe something like "automated finding"). I mean with your RFID tag in there, your book or thing or whatever can send a signal to a receiver and now the receiver possibly could be your smart phone, right? So while RFID has in fact made MY life hellish, I feel like there's more to it than what it's currently doing for us here in academic libraries in the US. But at the same time, I get the idea that people that I talk to in academic libraries in the US basically don't care about RFID and I kind of wonder why. They'd apparently rather talk about c4l illuminati. On a related note, there IS an RFID in Libraries list (which is where I'm getting a lot of this information from) but I'm not sure that it's quite the venue to start talking about standards and innovation, while I thought this list was. It makes me happy that one other person is interested in RFID in libraries... or were you just toying with my emotions? Christina Salazar -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Fitzpatrick Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2014 4:53 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Forwarding blog post: Apple, Android and NFC – how should libraries prepare? (RFID stuffs) So this thread started from talking about RFID ( "i'm interested!" ) to talking about augmented reality ( "uh, ok, now less interested...") to talking about standards ( "oh no, not again.." ) to talking about c4l ( "yep." ) So, are people using RFID? A lot? Is it working, or did it make life hellish? b,chris.
