[Koha-devel] RFID

[MJ Ray]

Fitzpatrick, Christopher wrote:
> So..are people using an RFID system with Koha? What vendors are they using
> for the RFID? What customizations were needed to get it to work with Koha?
> And most importantly, is the RFID system in production now?

The co-op deployed an early RFID system a few years ago but the basic
ideas are probably still similar. It used tags from tagsys for existing
or new non-RFID stock, pretagged books came from Dawson, the USB pads
connected to the staff terminals were from DLP and the self-issue and
gates were 3M-compatible ones.

I think the main customisations were adapting the circulation scripts to
read from the USB pads (the server made an SSL connection to a daemon
listening on the staff terminal accessing the librarian web interface)
if no barcode was typed, then update the tag to switch the security
on/off; and adding "program RFID tag" and "read RFID tag info" buttons
to the item editor.  I understand there was some problem with the
self-issue machines but they were addressed by other suppliers.
Portability of our solution was limited by the USB pads, an unusual
network layout (I think) and that they ran on MacOS X.  We published it
a few times but never managed to integrate it into Koha mainline because
testing it requires hardware that costed over $100 a terminal.  I don't
know whether it is still in production, but that's to be expected
because we were hired to develop rather than provide ongoing support.

If doing it again today, I'd be looking for SIP staff terminals or
specialist library RFID pads to do the tag programming instead of
customising the circulation and item editor to use dumb USB pads.  Those
pads worked but it wasn't pretty and it was fairly expensive because we
had to reverse-engineer a lot of the protocol by watching the pads and
testing what the 3M-compatible kit did to the tags.

I'd also work to the ISO tag model instead of trying to mimic the 3M
because everything should be standardised now, right? ;-)

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/