My work with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) is now complete. The results are in and soon senior management will go into conclave to consider recommendations and options before sending the white smoke up the chimney. This leaves me free to speak at least about the evaluation process – if not the actual selection.

Apart from standards one recurring theme of the process was the difficulty in reconciling the claims made for RFID as a technology with its application in libraries.

There are many layers of misunderstanding between libraries and their suppliers over what RFID is meant to be/do.

The first is the widely accepted use of the term “RFID” as shorthand for self-service:

Libraries and suppliers alike see the terms as interchangeable. (Oddly enough some parts of the world see “RFID” as being synonymous with “inventory”). This leads to a great deal of miscommunication – particularly when talking to tag manufacturers or more generalist RFID companies. Unless they are one of the companies that created this confusion in the first place the chances are that supplier and client will be speaking slightly different languages.

The next problem arises out of the approach taken by the RFID supplier in the first place:

Some RFID suppliers have a track record in library self-service, a handful even understand that library operations go beyond loans, but many came from the retail supply chain – a very different market altogether. In the fast moving and exciting world of RFID solutions appear and disappear rapidly. New tag technologies appear all the time making old ones obsolete.

In retail such rapid change is welcomed. In a market where the priorities are speed of supply, greater accuracy and better margins data standards are practically non-existent and tags – and tag data – change almost as fast as the applications that use them. These solutions are not designed to be used by anyone else, Asda don’t share their RFID warehousing solutions with Tesco. So the solutions are “closed loop” – i.e. they are designed to work in a closed environment to perform a particular task.

So when RFID suppliers came to libraries they assumed that lending of books was an equivalent operation to the delivery of consumables at the end of the supply chain and built solutions accordingly.

Job done?

Well, no. So long as self-service is all libraries want from RFID this “closed loop” approach works  very well  but what about using tagged stock to improve other library operations?

Looking at the RBKC offers I was struck by how different they were. From an LMS-oriented standpoint one would expect RFID suppliers to take account of the fact that libraries had already spent a great deal of money on systems and would probably not want to do anything that might jeopardise that investment.

A false assumption. Some did, but most had obviously ticked the “SIP support” box and moved on.  One supplier, seemingly unaware that libraries in the UK would already have a circulation control system, had created their own. Another used SIP to run staff workstations (thereby increasing licence costs charged by some LMS/ILS suppliers). Some even proposed replacing existing staff workstations altogether.

Each solution was clearly influenced by the direction of travel of the company supplying it. Those who kept up-to-date with advances in tag technology enthused about the potential of new tag design, others – with a retail background – focussed on speed of supply. Few spoke about interoperability with the LMS/ILS beyond SIP and self-service.

This selective view of the world can work both ways of course. I know of one LMS/ILS supplier, unaware that self-service was a hot topic in the UK, originally developed their RFID solution to make stocktaking faster by using UHF rather than the HF used by everyone else.

Even the more “savvy” RFID suppliers seem capable of proposing new solutions that could – if not carefully integrated – compromise existing systems by duplicating both data and functionality.

I’m not suggesting that innovation is a bad thing – indeed I believe there is much to be learned from other markets and booked Alastair McArthur – CTO at TagSys RFID – for the CILIP RFID conference later this year for precisely that reason. No I’m just suggesting – as you might expect – that you cannot make many assumptions about how RFID solutions will work. You have to do the research.

Like RBKC .