RFID mashups in the library - Thinkering Spaces (via Shifted Librarian)

Jenny Levine has a good story about innovative uses of RFID in libraries from the Thinkering Spaces project:

RFID is a big component of the system, as it identifies content and allows it to travel with an object. To start, the TS folks put a book with an RFID chip on the reader, which triggers a process that displays the cover on the screen, along with a keyboard for typing text to associate with the title. In this case, the container is the book, and the user can draw or type to add content that will travel with it. To illustrate this, they remove the first book and put a second one on the reader. A new cover image appears, along with some information that’s already been added by a previous user. Take that book off and put the first one back on, and the content we added reappears. The whole thing is very cool, and I immediately started thinking about local history collections, schoolwork, and reader reviews. All of which is the point - your librarian mind starts hopping with possibilities.

With this as a stepping stone, I can think of all kinds of other ways to combine RFID in the library with other services.  For instance -

If you have a library book that you like, and you want to get recommendations on more like it, swipe it past an RFID reader and get a display on the screen with suggestions.  If you want to check out any of them, you can hit the "reserve this" button on the screen, or get some kind of directions to get it from the shelf.

If you have a stack of library books, also stick them on the RFID reader as a pile and the recommendations would be all that much better - assuming that you have a recommendation system that generates better recommendations when it gets more to start from.

If you mostly get books on reserve, and want to find out where in the library the stacks are for the book you have, you can swipe the book and it would show you on some map where that stuff would be - or perhaps, for the recommendations, the variety of places in the library you might find things.

Just enough to get me thinking about how RFID could be more than something for checkout!

Comments

[Owen Stephens]

A few years ago I heard a speaker from a Danish library talk about something they were doing/thinking of doing with a 'fairy tale' cave for children - an area of the library, that when the children entered with an RFID tagged book, would project images or play a soundtrack relevant to the book they had.

I blogged the talk at http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2005/09/rfid.html, but unfortunately I didn't record the name of the speaker. From the programme, looks like they were from Silkeborg Public Library in Denmark

[Dave Pattern]

You might want to browse around the Blink web site (http://www.blinkmedia.org) -- especially the "Genie" and "Snakes & Ladders" projects :-)

I've been dying to do an RFID suggester for a pile of books for a couple of years now. I'll have to chase up our RFID supplier to see how I can interface with one of their RFID pads.

We've got an RFID booksorter that pauses on a "please wait" screen for several seconds as it processed each book -- it'd be great if we could change that so the user gets a "did you find this book useful?" with big "YES" and "NO" buttons on the touchscreen :-)