Seven stages, and two that always slip
A library RFID project runs from an assessment of your current position to a go-live, through specification, procurement, tagging, installation, integration and training. The equipment is rarely the hard part. The two stages that overrun are tagging the collection, because it is manual work at scale, and enabling the LMS interface, because it depends on a third party's schedule. Plan both first and the rest tends to follow.
The seven stages
- Assessment. Collection size, annual transactions, share of audiovisual stock, current equipment, floor plans, LMS and version. Six figures and two drawings. This is where a realistic configuration comes from, and it takes an afternoon.
- Configuration and business case. How many kiosks, where, with or without a sorter, how many destinations. We would rather tell you here that a sorter is not justified than sell you one that is not.
- Specification. The document that decides what you get. Our French pages include a specification guide; the English summary is on this page and we are happy to review a draft.
- Procurement. Timescales are yours, not ours. What we can do is make sure the questions in your document have verifiable answers.
- Tagging the collection. The long pole. See below.
- Installation and integration. Physical installation is days. The LMS interface is the critical path.
- Training and go-live. Staff first, the public second. A kiosk that staff cannot explain will not be used.
Tagging: the stage everyone underestimates
Every item in the collection needs a tag, applied and encoded with that item's identifier. On a 55,000-item collection that is 55,000 manual operations, each taking on the order of a minute including handling, encoding and verification.
Two ways to do it. In house, using your own staff, spread across weeks or months, with the cost appearing as redeployed time rather than as invoice. Contracted out, which costs money but does not consume your establishment. Most libraries do a mix: the contractor takes the bulk of the open-access collection, staff handle the awkward material and the stores.
Either way, plan for several workstations running in parallel. This is a line to budget explicitly: buying or hiring extra encoding plates for the duration of the campaign is cheap next to doubling the elapsed time.
LMS interface activation: the other one
Enabling SIP2 or NCIP on your library management system is not difficult work. It is work that has to be scheduled by your LMS vendor, who has their own queue. Raise it at the assessment stage, not when the kiosks arrive.
The five questions to put to them in writing are on our integration page. Get the answers before the specification goes out, because one of them, the number of connected devices allowed under your licence, can change how many kiosks you can afford.
A staged approach usually beats a single campaign
The eight functional areas of an RFID project are independent and share one tag. You can therefore start with the one that costs you most in staff time and add the rest later, at no technical penalty. The tagging investment is common to all of them, including the ones you buy in five years.
What is not reversible without cost: the data model chosen at encoding, the security mechanism, EAS or AFI, and the floor length reserved for a sorting line. Decide those three as if you were deciding for the whole decade, because you are.
Related pages
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Read →The questions that come up every time
How long does a whole project take ?
From assessment to go-live, most public library projects run somewhere between six months and two years, and procurement plus tagging account for most of it. The equipment lead time is rarely what decides.
Do we have to close during tagging ?
No. Tagging runs shelf range by shelf range while the library is open. Some libraries tag at the point of return instead, spreading the work over a year and catching the circulating collection first, which is the part that matters for self-service take-up.
Can we start with a single kiosk ?
Yes, and it is often sensible. A countertop unit on a corner of the desk will tell you your real take-up rate within six months, and you can size the permanent estate on measurements rather than assumptions.
Who trains our staff ?
We do, on site, before the public sees the equipment. The session that matters most is not the one on how the kiosk works: it is the one on what staff do when it refuses something, because that is the moment a borrower is standing in front of them.
Tell us about your library
Collection size, annual transactions, the LMS you run and your timescale. Four figures are enough for us to say what is relevant to you, and what is not.