Facet Publishing

Summary

Abstract

A review of recent developments in electronic publishing, with a focus on Open Access (OA) is provided. It describes the two main types of OA, i.e. the ‘gold’ OA journal route and the ‘green’ repository route, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the two, and the reactions of the publishing industry to these developments. Quality, cost and copyright issues are explored, as well as some of the business models of OA. It is noted that whilst so far there is no evidence that a shift to OA will lead to libraries cancelling subscriptions to toll-access journals, this may happen in the future, and that despite the apparently compelling reasons for authors to move to OA, so far few have shown themselves willing to do so. Conclusions about the future of scholarly publications are drawn.

Introduction

The scholarly publishing industry has been greatly affected by the digital era, because ‘the very content of the publishing business is, at the end of the day, a digitizable asset’ [1]. Scholarly publishers realized soon after the development of electronic databases in the early 1970s that ‘the content they acquire is an asset that can be manipulated and stored in digital form’ [1, p. 10] and, led by various experimental projects such as Quartet, a study of electronic journals funded by the British Library in the 1980s, they gradually over the next 30 years made the move from printed format to digital format, seeing it as a cheaper, faster and more effective method of getting their titles to their readers. Thus emerged the electronic journal, with one of the earliest launched in September 1990 (Electronic Journal of Communication). It was an early, free, online, peer-reviewed journal [2].

In this article, rather than looking back at the last 50 years of the scholarly publishing industry, some recent developments in the electronic scholarly publishing arena are considered. The focus is on the publication of primary scholarly information, i.e. publications that report original research findings (typically peer-reviewed), rather than on electronic abstracting and indexing databases (whose history has been well reviewed in [3, 4] and whose current situation can be gleaned from news items and comments in journals such as Online). There is also an emphasis in this article on electronic journals rather than e-books, as the e-book scholarly monograph market is very small at the moment.

Summary

It is difficult to be precise about the acorn that gave rise to this oak of an issue, but it seems to have been sown in the Strix Committee,1 which is why that Committee is also the Editorial Board of this special issue. A regret was voiced at one of the meetings of this Committee that so little had been done to formally capture the history of information science in the UK. ‘History is more or less bunk’, as the automobile magnate Henry Ford notoriously said. On the other hand, the Spanish philosopher George Santayana proposed that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. Reflecting on these thoughts last year, it was remembered that 2008 was the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Information Scientists in the UK, and that many of the ideas of the earlier information scientists are not only still valid today, but became the foundations upon which later generations have built. Consequently, feeling that it might be worth the effort to capture some insights into advances made in the last 50 years, a number of pre-eminent information scientists were commissioned to write articles on a range of topics reflecting many facets of information science. This issue does not purport to be a history of information science, nor a comprehensive review of each topic. The authors were given only broad guidelines and encouraged to choose their approach and style within them. All the contributions were read by the Editorial Board and, as is usual, all were refereed by peer professionals.

Hopes of consulting an Institute archive for this editorial were dented when it was discovered that the bulk of the material had been pulped when the Institute merged with The Library Association. Whatever may remain appears to be stored at two sites, and is not readily accessible. (This is not the only interesting archive to have gone missing: it seems that all the minutes, correspondence and copies of publications of about 40 years of hugely important work of the Classification Research Group was also lost in a separate misadventure).

Summary

Abstract

An attempt is made to discern the main research themes in British information science over the past half-century. Within these themes, emphasis is placed on research in the UK that has had some impact on the international information science community. The major factors that have influenced information science research in the UK are also briefly considered.

Introduction

Research that clearly falls under the ‘information science’ heading was already being carried out in the UK in the first half of the twentieth century, though the volume of such research was small. It was in the second half of the century that systematic research in this field – and, indeed, the name itself – became fully established, and that the amount of research began to grow rapidly. Today, information science has matured to the stage where even the study of its history has become a legitimate topic for research [1]. A definition of information science acceptable to everyone has always proved difficult to find, from the early days right up to the present. There has, however, been greater agreement on what are the important topics that information scientists should study: most of the topics mentioned in the early days are still regarded as important today, though relative emphases have changed. The development of information science research – as with most science and social science subjects – is reflected reasonably well by the changing nature of the research papers published in its leading journals. So I have used these as my main guide to UK research over the past half century.

The UK is fortunate in possessing a number of internationally recognized journals that cover library and information science research. These, and especially the Journal of Information Science and the Journal of Documentation, have published a wide variety of research by British information scientists over the past 50 years. The contents of the Journal of Information Science cover all areas of the field and little that is not relevant, but it only started publication in 1979. The Journal of Documentation gives better time coverage, since it goes back beyond the beginning of the period discussed here.

Summary

Introduction

It is a great privilege to be asked to contribute some comments to this special issue of JIS.

I have enjoyed reading these papers, and seeing how much our field has moved on since the Journal of Documentation attempted a similar historical survey in 1994 [1], just as the internet was ‘taking off ‘.

My first thoughts were of Jason Farradane, who played such a big part in founding the Institute of Information Scientists in 1958. The IIS has now disappeared within CILIP, and Jason would have been very dismayed at this development.

I first encountered him at the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference of 1948, where he spoke on ‘the scientific approach to documentation’. In 1952 he was one of the founder members of the Classification Research Group, where he was often defending a minority position, connected to his own ideas of relations between topics, to which Stella Dextre Clarke refers in her paper. He was a serious man, but the more I talked with him, and disagreed with him over many things, the more I liked him.

In 1955, we were invited together to a meeting of the Aslib Aeronautical Group, at which Cyril Cleverdon spoke about his plans for retrieval evaluation (Cranfield1), which Stephen Robertson discusses in his paper. We spoke about faceted classification, and Cyril challenged us to prepare a scheme for aeronautics, that he could use in his test. With inordinate bravado, we accepted the challenge, and – after much advice from Cyril and his team – managed to produce one. In retrospect – given that it was compiled by two chemists – we were amazed that it performed at all.

What else was happening around about 1958? There were printed publications of every kind. There were libraries – public, national, government, academic, institutional, industrial – and they were classified and had catalogues. We were much concerned with interlibrary loan, and Donald Urquhart had recently been told to drop all other work and start to plan a new national science lending library for the UK. There were printed indexing and abstracting periodicals, and bibliographies. An industrial firm might have, as well as a technical library, a centre for internal reports, a section dealing with patents, an ‘intelligence’ unit for commercial information, and a correspondence registry. Some of us were playing around with punched or edge-notched cards for ‘mechanized retrieval’.

Summary

Abstract

This paper explores the connections between two historical lines of research: social informatics in the United States, and sociotechnical studies in the United Kingdom. The author discusses samples of work from three long established UK research sites, at Manchester, Edinburgh and the London School of Economics, to give the reader a sense of sociotechnical work at different historical periods. Though the US and UK traditions share a common interest in the production of technology, and work with complementary concepts and methods, formal links between the two have not been strong for much of the historical period under review. However, there are signs of fusion in the work of a current generation of researchers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Introduction

Social Informatics is concerned with computerization, or the

transformation in human activity that follows the implementation, use and adoption of computers in different types of organization [1].

Historically, separate disciplines have explored this phenomenon from perspectives that focus on different stages of technological development: Human Computer Interaction has handled interface design and ergonomics; Information Systems has addressed analysis, design and implementation; LIS (Library and Information Science) has addressed information retrieval and use; Business and Management have addressed adoption and impact; Operations Research has modelled processes. Social Informatics (SI), in contrast, is transdisciplinary, tracing antecedents and consequences across these different phases of development, and treating technology as an evolving assemblage of interests, activities and artefacts that is shaped over time in local conditions.

The US tradition

In the United States, an explicit SI line of thinking was first articulated in the early 1970s by an eclectic group of analysts working at the University of California, Irvine, exploring information systems in local government across the US. Perplexed by the mismatch between accounts from engineering, managerial and operating staff of the impact of ICTs on organization, Kling and Scacchi [2] produced an explanatory frame, the ‘web of computing’, in a seminal paper that was in effect a manifesto for a new line of inquiry.

Summary

Abstract

Some developments in the information science discipline over a period of 30 years are discussed, by selecting topics covered in the early issues of Journal of Information Science, and tracing their influence on subsequent developments, largely though by no means exclusively through JIS papers. Five main themes are covered: the information discipline per se; the foundations of that discipline; the nature of information; relations between discipline and profession; and education for information science. The continuing resonance of the writings of Farradane and Brookes is noted.

Introduction

The Journal of Information Science (JIS) was first published in 1979, replacing The Information Scientist (TIS) which – though described as the ‘journal of the Institute of Information Scientists’ – was not generally regarded as a true academic/professional journal. The intervening period of nearly 30 years, a time span commonly taken as equivalent to a ‘generation’, gives the opportunity to consider the issues covered in the early issues of JIS, to set them into the context of the development of the information science discipline over time, and to assess the significance of some of the main contributions and contributors.

This is done by focusing on some of the articles and editorials published in the first two volumes of JIS, covering the years 1979 and 1980, tracing some of the preceding treatment of the issues, and following later developments, particularly – though not exclusively – through the pages of TIS and JIS. The set of literature cited is selected to show the origins and development of the issues, and is in no way intended to be comprehensive.

The discussion is focused around five main, albeit overlapping, themes. An initial consideration of the information science discipline itself leads fairly naturally to thoughts on the foundations of the discipline, and that in turn to the central question of the nature of information. There follows a consideration of the relation between discipline and profession, and in particular the role of research, and the closely associated question of the most appropriate form of education for information science. As we shall see, all of these themes are represented in the first issues of JIS, and all have remained ‘live’ topics to the present day.

Summary

This chapter presents an example of a long-running RFID-based programme, designed to modernize a large public library service in the UK.

In the beginning …

When the library service of Essex County Council in the UK first became interested in RFID in the mid 1990s, it was for a very pragmatic reason. One of its largest libraries – Colchester, in the north-east of the county – had a radio frequency (RF) by-pass security system that had been installed in 1982. Such systems commonly work on one of two frequencies – 10.5 MHz and 8.2MHz – and at the time of the installation at Colchester, there were no regulations about which one should be used by libraries. Consequently, the 8.2 MHz frequency was chosen, as this was different from the 10.5 MHz used by the University of Essex (located nearby) so as to avoid causing problems for users of the two libraries. As the ‘by-pass’ element of the name suggests, the tags used in these systems remain permanently live and so taking a tagged item into an environment where the same frequency is used causes it to trigger the system's alarm.

A few years later, however, a protocol was devised to regularize the use of these two frequencies, so as to enable differentiation between use in the library environment and in retail. Unfortunately for Essex, the frequency allocated for retail use was the 8.2 MHz used in Colchester library, and as a result many of its customers found themselves setting off security system alarms in shops, simply by having a library book with them.

This was clearly a major public relations problem, with library users understandably concerned (at the very least) about being subjected to embarrassing and unnecessary searches and interrogations by retail security staff who were simply doing their job. The fact that this situation was nobody's fault – least of all that of the library service – was of little comfort or use in responding to the many resulting complaints.

Summary

What needs to happen? In what order? Who's in charge?

Project management

Most library services will be part of a larger organization, whether a council, college or business, which will have its own approach to high-level project management, and to which the service will have to conform. This may be one of a variety of approaches, ranging from PRINCE2 to the simpler Critical Path Method, and a detailed description of this level of project management is outside the scope of this book. It is highly likely, however, that some form of Project Initiation Document (PID) will be required, describing in some detail why the project is required, how it will be managed, the costs and the planned outcomes.

In this way the parent organization can satisfy itself that its rules for capital investment will be met – and so make funds available – as well as minimize risk and ensure that the project is planned, organized and managed correctly. It will be crucial to the success of the project that the service meets all of its parent body's requirements in terms of project sponsorship, management and control, particularly if the release of funds is staged according to milestone targets being achieved.

Rather than dwelling on these vital but high-level and fairly generic aspects of project management, this chapter concentrates on the more pragmatic elements of putting library RFID into practice and outlines the main areas that will need to be covered.

Risk management

Regardless of the higher-level project management approach adopted, it is highly likely that some form of risk management process will be required. This can be comparatively straightforward, but needs to be an honest and robust assessment of the possible obstacles that might lie ahead and of the likelihood of their happening. Table 11.1 shows a simple chart, outlining some possible risks arising from RFID and assessing the level of their possible impact, with proposed plans to address them.

This approach is simple, but if used rigorously can still be effective. However, this rigour is vital if the process is not to be simply a token gesture.

Summary

New to RFID? Curious about how it works? Want to know about RFID in the wider world? This chapter looks at the history and background of RFID technology, and outlines some of its uses in everyday life as well as exploring its main applications in libraries.

Why RFID and libraries?

Few, if any, technologies have had as immediate an impact on libraries as that of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). From a standing start in the mid 1990s to a position where an estimated 300 sites worldwide were home to 120 million tagged items by 2005, RFID has spread rapidly around the world's libraries seemingly with little to slow its progress.

This would be impressive under any circumstances, but it has been achieved against a background in which, even now, most industries still see RFID as an experimental product, whose return on investment is doubtful. The majority of commercial applications remain restricted to limited aspects of supply chain management, with tags used at the consignment or pallet level rather than on individual items.

At the time of writing, the very few commercial organizations operating RFID at item level on any significant scale are still seen very much as pioneers, with the RFID industry still some distance from even beginning to approach critical mass for item-level adoption.

Consequently, the claim in 2004 that ‘libraries are much further along with using RFID in a consumer environment than anybody else’ (Lichtenberg, 2004) might have been surprising, but could easily be justified. The main reasons for this are that, for many library managers:

Summary

The use of RFID in libraries has grown rapidly since the late 1990s, and has become a fundamental element in the design of many new major libraries around the world – from Seattle in the USA to Shenzhen in China. In some of these large libraries – Shenzhen has a stock of 2 million items, Seattle has capacity for nearly 1.5 million – this has included not only self-service but also automated stock handling. At Seattle, between 1100 and 1400 items can be dealt with per hour, returning them to the correct part of the library's ‘book spiral’, spread over four storeys.

However, the primary focus of most current implementations remains self-service, with the supply chain applications commonly found in other industries being adopted only in those countries where a centralized process is already in place. While frustrating to some observers, anxious to see the full benefits of RFID being exploited by libraries, it is perhaps understandable that library managers have concentrated on the ‘quick win’ that self-service provides. It is also possible to argue that, to some extent, libraries’ use of only a limited element of this technology's potential is no different from that of software generally.

According to the widely quoted statistics researched by the Standish Group (Johnson, 2002), only 20% of the features in enterprise software are ever used, with 19% rarely used and 45% never used. This may be partly a reflection of the trend towards software ‘bloat’, but also aligns with the familiar findings of Pareto's principle, with 80% of effects attributable to only 20% of causes.

More importantly, there are some aspects of RFID that, once taken for granted, are now being questioned. A statistic often quoted in the early days of library RFID was that tags would be able to achieve at least 100,000 cycles (or 50,000 loan and 50,000 return transactions) and so would easily outlast the items to which they were attached. More recently, however, 3M has suggested that not all tags are created equal, with some becoming inactive within a very short time, due to environmental effects (mainly heat) or simply the use of lower quality materials in construction (3M Library Systems, 2007).

Summary

Is RFID is safe? How can you tell? What laws and standards are there?

RFID – what are the safety concerns?

While concerns about privacy may not be universally held it might be expected that the health and safety implications of RFID would be an area of common interest to all potential users.

This is certainly true, albeit at a fairly specific level. Understandably, any technology which exposes its users to an additional source of electromagnetic radiation, which is the basis of RFID – even at very low levels – is likely to be the subject of a certain amount of legislation and regulation. Anxiety over prolonged use of mobile phones, for example, which also produce electromagnetic radiation, has shown that – despite regulation – there are many members of the public who remain unconvinced of the safety of prolonged use of such devices.

RFID and health and safety law

The legal position, in Europe at least, is in a transitional phase. The European Union published its Physical Agents (Electromagnetic Fields) Directive (2004/40/EC) in April 2004, at which point it came into force but with a target date of 30 April 2008 for completion of implementation by all Member States. However, this date was amended to 2012 in light of further research which suggested that some procedures in the medical field might exceed the directive's recommendations. Further research is now being undertaken so that any necessary amendments can be introduced before the 2012 deadline.

Nevertheless, the main areas of concern of the legislation are clear from the original directive, and relate to the possible risks of the exposure of workers to electromagnetic fields – primarily from short-term exposure to induced currents, energy absorption and contact currents. It outlines the minimum requirements necessary to address potential problems arising from these elements, but does not attempt to cover possible longer-term problems.

The limits to exposure that the directive stipulates are based on work carried out previously by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) (see www.icnirp.org), an independent organization that has done extensive research in this field.

However, it should be noted that this is the European position only, and that the legal situation will be different around the world. While many governments use the ICNIRP work as a basis for legislation, the ways in which RFID is implemented internationally nevertheless vary considerably.

Summary

Worried about rumours that RFID can compromise individual privacy? Want to know how to use it safely? And – is RFID really the work of the devil?

Interoperability and privacy

Unfortunately, one person's interoperability may be another's invasion of privacy. By making it possible for different systems to communicate with each other, some people fear that the data sharing that may result could produce a ‘Big Brother’ scenario in which it is all too easy for individuals to be identified, resulting in government snooping, identity theft and other undesirable outcomes.

Such a view has not – so far at least – been very widely held in the UK, or in Europe, although the European Union set up a working party and invited views on the subject in 2005 (European Commission, 2005; Commission of the European Communities, 2007); there was, however, little agreement about the extent of the problem in reality.

This is in marked contrast to the USA – or rather some parts of it – where the use of RFID has been very controversial. In San Francisco, implementation of RFID in libraries has been – and continues to be – the subject of great public debate, while in neighbouring Berkeley it appears to have played a role in the resignation of the chief librarian, Jackie Griffin, from her post (Bender, 2006): ‘There have been complaints and protests about the library's radio frequency identification devices, a system Griffin backed and the city spent at least $1.1 million buying and installing. Many library workers have complained about the so-called “spy chips,” alleging they compromise patron privacy and deter good customer service.’

RFID opponents

A number of organizations have been very active in trying to alert the public to what they see as the dangers of RFID use in terms of personal liberty, particularly in the post-9/11 scenario of the USA PATRIOT Act and other restrictions on privacy. One of those with the highest profile is CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) (www.nocards.org). As is evident from its name, CASPIAN's original concerns stemmed mainly from the use of RFID in the retail world. One of its main targets has been Wal-Mart, which has been at the forefront of RFID use in retail, having mandated its top 100 suppliers to use tags.

Summary

How can RFID influence library layouts? Does RFID affect work areas too?

The changing role of library buildings

Library buildings have to accommodate a remarkable, and occasionally unreasonable, range of demand. Increasingly, this is a result of a desire for them to be, or be part of, multipurpose community hubs, one-stop shops, or satellite outreach facilities, aimed at audiences who might otherwise never think of going to a library, or who are unable to access the service in any other way.

This places further pressure on the manager seeking to maximize the use of what is often already inadequate space for library stock and staff, but is only the latest in a long series of challenges facing those charged with designing library spaces.

Godfrey Thompson's detailed and pragmatic guide to library design (1989) makes it clear that the responsibility of planning a building intended to be adaptable to all of the changes likely over the next 60 years has always been a heavy one. Sometimes, this is because of the competing requirements of the architect, wishing to produce a building that makes a ‘statement’, and of the librarian, who may sympathize with the architect's objectives but hopes that it will nevertheless still be possible to change the light bulbs without having to hire tower scaffolding.

Such situations are not uncommon, and have been a feature of library design since the two professions began working together. However, the challenges created by changing technology and demand are currently both more pressing and fundamental. Thompson's design guide was first published in 1973, but by the time of its third edition in 1989 computerization had begun to have a significant and disruptive influence on library planning.

The impact of computerization

Some of this was perceived as beneficial: electronic union catalogues not only gave library users much better service – customers were no longer limited to the resources of the building they were in; they could see at a glance whether what they sought was immediately available; and if not they could instantly place a reservation – but they also did away with the need to find space to accommodate thousands of 5 x 3 cards.

Summary

If your staff aren't going to be stamping books, what will they be doing? How many of them will you need?

RFID and staffing efficiencies

One of the main reasons for the popularity of RFID in libraries, as we have seen, has been the popularity of the self-service systems it can provide, resulting in high levels of take-up by the public, and the consequent freeing of staff from routine counter procedures.

As staffing tends to account for the largest single element of most libraries’ expenditure, this understandably leads to questions about whether financial savings can be made as a result of this reduction in workload. Different library services have responded to these questions in different ways, reflecting their circumstances and the underlying aims of their business cases. Nevertheless, this topic is usually at the heart of most RFID deployments, with some library services taking 100% of the savings available to them to meet budgetary pressures or efficiency drives, others retaining all the staff time freed and using it for other purposes, or a combination of the two, offering an improvement to the customer but still saving money.

For example, in the UK the approach taken by Essex County Council's Libraries Department when building its business case to roll out RFID beyond its existing four sites was to identify the levels of saving that could be made in staff time, and then show how these could be used to achieve a mix of outcomes. It demonstrated how it could:

Summary

Need to know about standards? Are there any? Who produces them? What effect do they have?

Standards, or free for all?

One of the principal contributory factors to the rapid take-up of RFID systems in the library world has been the view – taken by vendors and buyers alike – that solutions for individual libraries or networks can be considered to be closed loops. In such a scenario, there is no need to be concerned about standards or interoperability with other libraries – let alone other organizations – as the emphasis is entirely on RFID's performance within the local context.

This is perhaps not too surprising. It is arguable that – despite a raft of standards relating to cataloguing, indexing and other professional staples – it is only comparatively recently (since the coming of the internet?) that interoperability has been the focus of much attention in the world of library technology, with most systems being largely proprietary.

More specifically – and crucially – the level of interoperability between different manufacturers’ LMS has been very low. Even though this has begun to change, it still remains a major concern and has long been an obstacle to joint working. One example of this (among many) is a project begun in 1999/2000, jointly funded by the UK's Department of Culture Media and Sport and the Wolfson Foundation (DCMS, 2000), which saw the creation of a public library cooperative organization in the east of England, called CO-EAST, whose primary remit included the provision of unmediated interlibrary loans between the 14 authorities in the region, allowing the customers of one library service to place holds on material held by any of the others.

For this to work, it was necessary to get three different LMS to communicate with each other, providing not only the facility to search individual catalogues – a comparatively straightforward project – but also to recognize the details and status of the members of 14 different library services. Unfortunately, this simple-sounding concept proved impossible to put into practice, and some six years after CO-EAST was set up (and despite many other achievements) it was disbanded, with its initial objective still unfulfilled.

Summary

How do you choose a system? How do you know it's the right one for you? How do you demonstrate it's the right one for you? How will it work with your LMS? How will your staff work with it?

Range of suppliers/range of responses

There is now a wide range of suppliers serving the library RFID market, and so any request for proposal (RFP) is likely to elicit a sizeable response. It will soon become clear that while some systems may be similar, there are big differences between others. The gradual establishment of standards is starting to reduce some of these differences by specifying approaches which will maximize interoperability and the most efficient ways of working, but they will nevertheless be put into practice in different ways by individual suppliers, while still conforming to the standard.

There is no single, perfect library RFID system that will meet everybody's needs, simply because everybody's needs are slightly (or sometimes, very) different. As a result, this range of responses should be seen as a good thing, and the sign of a healthy market. The challenge is to ensure that the most appropriate system is matched to the library concerned. It is also important to be able to demonstrate that this has been done.

Why systematic evaluation is important

Once the decision has been taken to adopt RFID, after determining the requirements and issuing an RFP from suppliers through the appropriate channels, a process will then be needed to ensure that the responses received from suppliers are evaluated in a systematic and fair way.

It perhaps should go without saying that this is an essential part of ensuring that the system chosen is the one which most closely meets the requirements that have been specified, but it is sometimes forgotten that, in addition, suppliers need to be confident that their responses are being considered against objective criteria that are applied consistently, rather than subjectively and randomly. Suppliers invest as much – if not much more – time in the process of responding to RFPs as their potential customers do, and expect that their efforts will be judged fairly.

Summary

Wondering if you still need an LMS? If you do, how does RFID work with it? Is RFID just about self-service? What else can it do?

RFID and the LMS – why do you need both?

As we have seen, RFID – at least currently – is not a self-contained library product. It simply provides an alternative method of accessing an LMS, enabling library staff and customers to exploit the benefits of the technology – no need for line of sight, rapid read of multiple items – and so making the LMS more user friendly and able to carry out a wider range of tasks.

Some library managers have queried why, if this is the case, RFID has to be developed in a specific way for application in libraries if it simply provides what is a ‘front end’ to an existing technology – and some of them, to a greater or lesser degree, have been successful; for example, through the use of generic terminals for self-service.

Others have questioned the split between RFID and LMS, and wondered why suppliers do not simply integrate the technologies into one product – an RFID-enabled LMS. There are certainly examples of companies that provide both technologies – VTLS in the USA, and DS in the UK being two companies that supply both LMS and RFID systems, although their provision of one does not preclude supply of the other by another company. Similarly, some LMS suppliers have formed strategic partnerships with RFID suppliers, and vice versa, but have understandably not limited themselves to those liaisons, as their existing customers may well wish to choose a system that falls outside such arrangements.

Either way, it is very likely at present that most libraries will have to deal with two different companies (at least) when installing an RFID system. The reason for this perhaps relates rather more to the current commercial state of the library technology market than to the technology itself. It would be possible to develop a fully integrated RFID-enabled LMS, but it appears to require a level of investment and development which neither LMS nor RFID suppliers currently wish, or are able, to contemplate.

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