An announcement curiously dated 9th February 2010 (presumably released at VALA in Melbourne?) has been reported by the excellent Marshall Breeding on the Library Technology Guides website today.

The announcement contains the following paragraph:

“Civica and Bibliotheca will collaborate on the technology development of their respective RFID-enabled library solutions enabling tight integration into the Civica Spydus suite of library solutions. The tight integration with the Civica Spydus solutions will eliminate the use of unwieldy interface protocols and will realise significantly higher levels of efficiency, speed and automation opportunities for library customers as well as the possibility for closer integration into external solutions such as finance management.

Bibliotheca and Civica will both be able to offer UHF and HF RFID Library Systems providing libraries with enhanced efficiency, productivity gains and flexibility. This provides libraries with increased choice and performance over comparable RFID-enabled library solutions currently on offer.”

This must be some kind of record for raising so many issues in such a short statement. UK clients of Civica and Axiell will be among those with some questions to ask one would imagine. The current co-operation between Civica and Intellident that I heard about only last week looks a little shakier all of a sudden.

But most of all the throwaway references to “unwieldy protocols” and the implied combination of UHF and HF technologies in the future gives me considerable pause for thought.

What does it mean? An end to reliance on SIP perhaps – but UK suppliers – including Bibliotheca, Civica and Axiell are scheduled to discuss that very topic in three weeks from now. So how will this agreement affect those discussions?

Or do they mean and end (even before they begin) to standards?  Australia (where this announcement was presumably made) has a number of Civica libraries using UHF-based RFID systems as we learned at the London conference in 2009. We also learned – from the world’s leading manufacturer of RFID chips – that UHF was an unsuitable technology for library use and yet here are two of the world’s largest suppliers announcing their ability to provide both.

Now we all know that UHF and HF don’t work together, and that UHF is currently incapable of supporting the international library data standard. So how will this new arrangement increase choice?

Perhaps my Australian readers can offer an explanation? Or at least go and ask Civica and Bibliotheca what this announcement really means.

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