Superpatron

now where did I put that book?

I'm hunting for a library book that I need to return.  where did I put it?  (and can technology help me find it?)

All of the library books I have are tagged with RFID chips, which is used for inventory control.  That should mean that I can use something like this 3M RFID locator device as a reader and scanner to locate a lost item. 

(And, at that point, I'm almost ready to put a chip in my glasses to help locate them.)

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!

Manufacturing spimes: building the book as a digital and analog object

A conversation at lunch today with superpatron Bill Tozier about building books that were also digital objects prompted this question.

Let's say for sake of argument that you wanted to print books that were also the delivery vehicle for the source code / original text of the book.  What technology would you use, and how would you manufacture the resulting object?

The minimum of this is to print a URL on the book pointing at a web source for the source code, but that's doable now, so the cool factor is low.  A slightly more snazzy approach makes that URL machine readable, or embeds it in an RFID device which is queryable, but in any case the information content of the book is low.

A second approach I suppose would be to burn digital media and embed or insert it in the book packaging.  The old school way to do this is a CD-ROM, as my prized Storage Mania issue of Mediamatic (1994) predicts:

According to some estimates, by the end of this century the total amount of computer memory in the world will be greater than the total amount of information in the world. The curves will intersect. At this point the demand for storage space will give way to a demand for information.

By that time historians will look back with a smile on our current worries about information overload. Once the data banks are up-to-date they will begin storing information directly at its source. Fresh info will instantly be slurped up by a hungry archive; first come, first served. All intelligent agents will be bought away from their bosses by desperate archivists, to join the rat race for unarchived data.

Any better suggestions welcome (high data rate RFID?)

For more on spimes see Bruce Sterling in Wired, Oct 2004.

(for the "future of the book" category)

Risks of RFID in library systems - Wired 14.05: The RFID Hacking Underground

Libraries have been early adopters of RFID systems.  Here's a recent account of some of the steps that didn't quite get implemented on the way into production:

Wired 14.05: The RFID Hacking Underground:

Frank Mussche, Libramation's president, acknowledges that the library's tags were left unlocked. "That's the recommended implementation of our tags," he says. "It makes it easier for libraries to change the data."

For the Oakland Public Library, vulnerability is just one more problem in a buggy system. "This was mostly a pilot program, and it was implemented poorly," says administrative librarian Jerry Garzon. "We've decided to move ahead without Libramation and RFIDs."

But hundreds of libraries have deployed the tags. According to Mussche, Libramation has sold 5 million RFID tags in a "convenient" unlocked state.

This state of affairs is noted in the UBC SLAIS (library school) "Foundations of Information Technology" project notes by student Todd Gnissos :

One of the primary issues to be concerned with an RFID implementation is the immaturity of the industry. Standards are only just being developed. Tags and readers are being modified and improved at a rapid rate. Competing technologies and non-crosscomplient systems still exist. This ongoing development could make equipment and tags obsolete, rendering investments in older equipment useless, and requiring expensive conversions and upgrades. This is especially concerning for multi-unit libraries that may implement one branch at a time over several years.

A paper by Molnar and Wagner from CCS '04 entitled "Privacy and Security in Library RFID: Issues, Practices, and Architectures" (pdf) looks at first read to have a good computer-science background review of the key special issues in RFID in libraries:

We expose privacy issues related to Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) in libraries, describe current de-
ployments, and suggest novel architectures for library
RFID. Libraries are a fast growing application of RFID;
the technology promises to relieve repetitive strain in-
jury, speed patron self-checkout, and make possible com-
prehensive inventory. Unlike supply-chain RFID, library
RFID requires item-level tagging, thereby raising imme-
diate patron privacy issues. Current conventional wis-
dom suggests that privacy risks are negligible unless an
adversary has access to library databases. We show this
is not the case

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