The Conseil départemental de l’Aisne in northern France is tagging 300,000 books, comics, CDs and DVDs with RFID chips and pushing them out across the 120 libraries it supplies. The work is being run by Aisne Lecture Publique, the department’s public reading service, and it is not a single-site install. It is a rolling programme that empties and restocks one partner library at a time, with completion targeted for 2028.
The department does not run those 120 libraries. It stocks them. Aisne Lecture Publique holds a central collection at Laon and circulates it out to the network, which means every item is handled repeatedly over its life. That is exactly the workload RFID was built to cut.
Batch reading instead of scanning book by book
The core gain is that RFID does not need line of sight. A barcode has to be presented to a scanner one item at a time. An RFID tag can be read in a stack, in a crate, or through a shelf.
“We are no longer obliged to scan book by book as we did with barcodes,” said Sébastien Audierne, head of the digital unit for libraries. “We can now process books in batches.”
The department has put a figure on it. “For 30 documents it used to take five minutes with the old system,” said Florence Bertanier, digital project officer. “With RFID chips, 30 seconds is enough.” That is a tenfold reduction on a task the team repeats constantly, and it is the sort of number that decides whether a circulating collection of this size is manageable at all.
Each item now carries a chip that is read by a reader, described by the department as an automate, a pad reader or a mobile terminal. The staff benefit is not only speed. Fewer repetitive movements means less exposure to musculoskeletal injury, which for a team that lifts and sorts crates of books all week is a genuine operational argument rather than a marketing one.
“It is a major change,” said Emilie Thilliez, head of the Aisne Lecture Publique service. “RFID technology is a digital tool that lets us manage and lend our collections more efficiently and more quickly, while making handling easier.”
50,000 first, then the 250,000 out in the network
The rollout was sequenced to get the easy part done first. Phase one tagged the 50,000 documents sitting in the central store at Laon, which were taken out of circulation temporarily so they could be encoded in bulk in one controlled place.
The harder 250,000 are scattered across the 120 partner libraries, and those cannot simply be pulled off a shelf in a warehouse. Each library is prepared in advance with a meeting for staff and local elected members, an explanation of the stages, and then a period where the library has to chase in and hold back everything its readers currently have on loan. Library staff then travel to the Aisne Lecture Publique premises to choose the RFID-tagged items that will make up their new collection.
“The team has designed an extremely rigorous protocol,” said Thomas Dudebout, vice-president of the Conseil départemental de l’Aisne for digital transition and strategy.
One library, 5,700 books out and 1,875 in
The swap itself takes one or two days depending on volume. At the médiathèque in Mons-en-Laonnois, during the February half-term, 5,700 items were collected, crated and returned to the shelves at Laon. In exchange the library received a completely renewed collection of 1,875 items for its 270 members.
The smaller number is deliberate. Older stock that nobody wants to borrow had built up over the years, and the tagging exercise doubles as an item-by-item audit of what is actually worth keeping. “We are starting again on sound foundations,” said Thilliez.
“We had to plan ahead to get back all the books lent to members in time,” said Amélie Adam, librarian at Mons-en-Laonnois, “but they will now be able to discover all the new titles and their rearranged médiathèque.”
Lighter shelves have had a knock-on effect the department says it did not fully expect. “Some libraries have thanked us,” said Bertanier. “They are rearranging and reviving their spaces, and finding that books circulate better, that they are borrowed more often by their readers.”
Pace and remaining scope
Twenty-four libraries had their entire collection renewed during 2025, and the department expects to treat around twenty a year from here, finishing the full network of 120 member libraries by 2028. Nicolas Rébérot, vice-president for cultural action and heritage, framed it as part of a longer modernisation of public reading in the department, aimed at giving residents faster and more regular access to new titles.
What has not been disclosed
The department has not named a tag, kiosk or gate supplier, has not published a budget for the programme, and has not stated the operating frequency or the data model used on the tags. Nor has it said whether public self-service issue and return, or returns boxes, form part of the deployment. The readers described so far are staff-side tools for handling stock in bulk, so anything beyond that would be speculation.
Industry context
For readers unfamiliar with the sector, library RFID is one of the most standardised corners of the industry. Deployments are overwhelmingly HF at 13.56 MHz to ISO/IEC 15693, with ISO 28560 defining how the data is encoded on the tag so that items stay readable across different suppliers, different library management systems and different member libraries. That interoperability matters most in exactly this kind of arrangement, where stock is owned centrally and circulated between many independent sites.
The usual payoff is threefold: self-service issue and return, whole-shelf inventory using a handheld wand rather than item-by-item barcode scanning, and security gates that detect the same tag instead of requiring a separate electromagnetic strip. Aisne has publicly claimed the handling and stock management benefits so far. Whether it takes the self-service and gate elements as well is not something the department has said.
Read more at https://aisne.com/actualites/neuf-dans-bibliotheques
