Hi Laurence

I'm not certain that bright tech savvy students are much better at returning stock than the hoi polloi although they are certainly better at hiding stock!

If you haven't had a stock check at Bath since 1996 you'll probably find that 25-30% of your stock has gone missing - which might also be having an impact on loan figures.

You're quite right about the benefits of cooperation. So why not join those of us striving to deliver the benefits you have identified?

You might also consider the many other ways in which developments in RFID can benefit even a university that has always had a fine tradition of using technology - in smartphones, cards etc.

Best wishes

Mick



Sent from my iPhone

On 22 Nov 2011, at 09:36, Laurence Lockton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hello Simon,
> 
> I don't get that. How can you be convinced of the benefits if you're not sure what they are? :)
> 
> Seriously, I'm not totally unconvinced of the benefits of RFID but I don't feel I could make a case for it here at the University of Bath.
> 
> I think the self-service argument depends largely on your borrower population. For public libraries, I can see how EM/barcode would be fairly hopeless. But our borrowers are nearly all at undergraduate level of education or above, generally young and tech-savvy, and have little trouble learning to use our EM/barcode self-service machines (3M V-series, which I have to say are extremely good. We had another make before. That wasn't so good.)
> 
> Other factors are that only about one third of the loanable collection gets borrowed in a year, so we'd be tagging a lot of items that never move. And borrowing is on a gradual decline, which we assume is because of the shift to digital.
> 
> I'm not sure there's much of a case for RFID from the stock management angle either. We haven't felt the need to do a stock check since the library was rebuilt in 1996, and otherwise I'm not sure there'd be that much benefit.
> 
> There might be more of a case if you could show that the whole library community has cooperated to make RFID useful for things like ILL, resource sharing and stock moves. So often collections are split or merged and moved about, because of a course moving from one institution to another, or because of the merger of institutions, for example. But I suspect this only leads to expensive re-tagging projects (to go along with the inevitable reclassification) rather than being helped along by the existing RFID implementations.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Laurence
> 
> -- 
> Laurence Lockton
> University of Bath