The University of Wyoming Libraries has tagged 2 million items with RFID across six locations, replacing a manual inventory process that previously took around five years to complete. The project covers the main William Robertson Coe Library in Laramie and four branches, including the National Park Service Library at Grand Teton, housed at the AMK Ranch field station. Library RFID on this scale is what finally makes a full stock check practical rather than aspirational.
Jamie Markus, Associate Dean of Collections, led the conversion. He came to the role after 18 years at the Wyoming State Library, seven of them as State Librarian, and he was blunt about the driver behind the decision.
“We went to RFID because we wanted to inventory our two-million items, and in quicker fashion, quite frankly,” Markus said.
Fifteen months from plan to finish
The libraries spent six months planning and nine months in implementation, 15 months in total. Bibliotheca supplied the equipment and tags, while Iron Mountain handled the physical tagging of every item.
“I sat in the middle between our good friends at Bibliotheca…with Iron Mountain doing the actual tagging,” Markus said.
The deployed technology includes RFID security gates, selfCheck 3000 self-service kiosks (existing units were upgraded and one new unit added), an RFID inventory wand, staff pads and libraryConnect LINK software. Library systems of this type generally operate in the HF 13.56 MHz band, using ISO 15693 air interface tags with ISO 28560 governing how library data is encoded on them, which is what allows tags, gates, kiosks and wands from different points in the supply chain to work together.
Staff worried about the tagging, not the technology
The resistance Markus encountered was practical rather than philosophical. Nobody argued about RFID itself. They worried about the sheer volume of work.
“They were more hesitant about putting tags in two-million books. Would we be done in time?” he said.
Training turned that around. “The trainers are wonderful, really amazing…That gave them an answer to the ‘why’ we were doing this,” Markus said. His main recommendation to other libraries planning a conversion is to bring that training forward: “take the training as early as possible…we made some immediate pivots that we could have made a little earlier.”
IT integration was the other area needing attention. “We had to work with IT…Bibliotheca folks were truly wonderful with the tech help,” he said.
Beyond the inventory
Faster stocktaking was the headline reason, but not the only one. The libraries also wanted to update their self-checkout machines and capture better statistics on how the collection is actually used, including gate counts and circulation tracking. That data is a by-product of RFID that many libraries underestimate before they have it.
Next on the list are a wider rollout of the inventory wand, unmanned branches, and after-hours lockers for pickups and returns. All three depend on item-level identification working reliably without a member of staff present, which is precisely what the tagging programme delivers.
“We’re future-proofing,” Markus said. “Who knows what the future will bring, but we have options with RFID that we didn’t have before.”
Photo courtesy of the University of Wyoming
Read more at https://www.bibliotheca.com/library-story-university-of-wyoming-libraries/
