Bibliotheca has published a case study describing the RFID system behind the library at the Islamic Civilization Center in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a build that put 200,000 RFID tags into a single collection. The Center opened in March 2026 and the case study was published in September 2026.
The Islamic Civilization Center is a landmark cultural and research institution in the Uzbek capital, conceived as an intellectual hub for the Islamic world and built around the legacy of scholars born on Uzbek soil, among them the hadith scholar Imam al-Bukhari. Its library covers roughly 3,105 square metres and is designed to accommodate close to 300 readers. The collection brings together ancient manuscripts, scholarly and literary works, historical publications and rare holdings, and the exhibitions around it pair historical material with interactive and digital technology, including a treatment of the three major Renaissance periods Central Asia has experienced.
Why a catalogue on its own was not enough
According to Bibliotheca, the brief was never simply to digitise a card catalogue. The Center wanted open access to a valuable collection, physical protection for rare and often fragile material, and self-service that works for an international audience of researchers, students, scholars and tourists, all of it to international library standards. Those requirements pull against each other in a conventional library, which is the usual reason an institution of this kind turns to RFID.
What was installed
Bibliotheca is a library technology supplier that sells self-service, security and collection management systems to public, academic and national libraries worldwide. It delivered the Tashkent project with SmartLibrary, its official partner in Central Asia, which handled local implementation and support.
The equipment list runs to selfCheck 3000 kiosks, the self-service terminals that let a reader borrow or return items without going to a desk and that read several tagged items at once rather than one barcode at a time. RFID gate ultra units sit at the entrances and exits, reading tags as items pass through and flagging anything that has not been checked out, which is how a library can keep an open, browsable floor without losing stock. DLA inventoryWand handheld readers let staff sweep a shelf, read every tag in range and check the result against the catalogue, a job that takes a fraction of the time of a manual shelf read.
Behind the scenes there are shielded RFID workstations, where new stock is tagged and encoded without the reader picking up tags sitting on the next desk. Hublet tablet lending stations let visitors borrow a tablet to reach electronic resources and information about the Center, with staff controlling which applications and web pages are available and user data deleted automatically when the tablet is returned. Tying the devices together is uniFi+, Bibliotheca’s integrated network and communications solution.
What 200,000 tags actually means
The tag count is the headline figure and it is a substantial deployment by library standards. 200,000 items is comparable to the entire lending stock of a mid-sized UK public library service, committed here to a single building. Every one of those tags has to be applied to an item and encoded with that item’s identifier before any of it works, which makes tagging by far the largest piece of labour in a project on this scale. Bibliotheca describes the figure as a scalable foundation for a significant and growing collection rather than a final count, so there is headroom to tag new acquisitions on the same system.
Frequency and standards
The case study does not state a frequency or an air interface standard for the Tashkent installation. As standing context, library RFID of this kind is conventionally HF at 13.56 MHz, with the data model set by ISO 28560, the standard that defines how an item identifier and its related data elements are written to a tag so that equipment from different suppliers can read the same stock. Bibliotheca’s own library supplies pages state that all its RFID tags comply with the ISO 18000-3 Mode 1 and ISO 15693 air interface protocols, both of which run at 13.56 MHz, and that its SLi-1 and SLi-2 chips support data storage in the ISO 28560 format. That is a statement about the product range, not a confirmed specification for this site. The RFID glossary covers HF, air interface protocols and library data models.
Reading the claims
The outcome language belongs to the vendor. Bibliotheca reports faster service, stronger security, optimised collection management and a modern, user-friendly research experience, and those are its characterisations, published in its own Library Stories series rather than independently measured. What is concrete is the equipment list, the 200,000 tag count, the 3,105 square metres, the capacity of nearly 300 readers and the March 2026 opening.
Named at the foot of the case study as the people behind the project are Sarvar Mamatkulov, project manager at SmartLibrary, and Joey Ferrigno, sales manager for Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Baltics at Bibliotheca. Neither is quoted in the piece. The Center reports scholarly events, research activity and a growing collection, and has stressed the role of digitisation, electronic catalogues and multilingual resources in its library.
More deployments of this kind are collected in our case studies, security and hardware sections.
Read more at https://www.bibliotheca.com/en-gb/islamic-civilization-center-rfid/
