Worcestershire County Council has delivered just over £300,000 of staff savings by letting library members in through the door when no staff are on site, according to papers put before a council panel and reported on 4 October 2026 by the Local Democracy Reporting Service. The scheme, Libraries Unlocked, now runs at 11 of the county’s 23 libraries. Neither the council nor its supplier uses the word RFID anywhere in describing how it works, which rather undersells the point: the saving rests on two separate radio reads doing two completely different jobs.
Members aged 15 and over who complete a face-to-face induction can upgrade their card free of charge and use a participating library from 8am to 8pm, with core staffed sessions still running through the week. Under-15s may visit during Libraries Unlocked hours but must be accompanied by a registered member, a safeguarding condition the council states plainly. Each site has full CCTV coverage, emergency phones and monitoring by County Hall Security.
Two reads, two jobs
The supplier is Lyngsoe Systems, the Danish automation firm best known in this sector for library materials handling and sortation, and to readers of this site for the real-time location work at Aalborg University Hospital. Its published Worcestershire case study lists three elements. Lyngsoe Self-Operated Library, or SOL, handles access outside staffed hours. Lyngsoe Phoenix tabletop kiosks handle borrowing, returning and renewing at every site in the network. PaperCut, the print management platform used widely across schools, universities and councils to meter and charge for printing, is integrated into the kiosks so that users can top up a balance and print without asking anyone for help. Lyngsoe says the PaperCut integration was co-developed with the council.
Our reading of what that means in radio terms, and it is our reading rather than anything the council or Lyngsoe claims, is this. The issue, return and renewal side is item-level HF RFID at 13.56 MHz. UK public libraries standardised on HF item tagging under ISO 28560, the international standard that defines the data elements and encoding rules written to a library item tag, and have done so for years. A Phoenix tabletop unit is a pad reader: you put the book down, it reads the tag in the spine or the inside cover, and the loan is recorded.
The door is a different read entirely. That is a credential read of the library card, not an item read, and it authorises a person rather than a transaction. Two technologies, two purposes, both described in the coverage only as “new technology” or “self-service technology”. If you want the distinction in one line, the kiosk asks what, the door asks who. Our access control coverage is full of deployments that get one of those two right and the other wrong.
The choice of HF for circulation is not an accident of history. At 13.56 MHz the read range is short and deliberate, so a single item presented to a pad reads reliably without the reader also picking up the shelf behind it. That selectivity is the usual reason libraries never moved circulation to UHF, where the longer range that makes RAIN RFID so useful in a warehouse becomes a liability at a counter stacked with other people’s returns.
The pilot numbers, and the network numbers
Phase 1 went live in June 2022 at Stourport and Droitwich. On the council’s own first-year reporting, opening hours at those two sites rose 85%, while core staffing hours fell 26% at Droitwich and 37% at Stourport. A council presentation cites a 56% increase in library visits twelve months after go-live. During the extended unstaffed hours in that first year the two sites together recorded 13,599 visits, 17,314 issues and 3,608 public computer sessions, which worked out at 8% of total visits and 11% of total issues for the two libraries. After one year, 68% of active members at Stourport and 52% at Droitwich had signed up for access, though later council documents give higher figures for the same measure, 79% and 65% in one presentation and 78% and 63% in a 2025 document.
Officers reporting to a council scrutiny board on 12 February 2024 were candid about one thing: overall user numbers had risen only marginally against pre-COVID levels. Longer hours did not by themselves conjure new readers.
Across the network, Lyngsoe’s case study records 130,263 Libraries Unlocked visits between June 2022 and November 2025, 17,480 customers registered as Libraries Unlocked members since June 2022, weekly opening hours up 59%, and more than 95% of transactions, including renewals and returns, completed at a kiosk or online. The council’s own page, using data to the end of May 2025, gives over 15,000 customers signed up, more than 100,200 visits, 113,000 book issues and over 26,500 public computer sessions during Libraries Unlocked hours. An October 2024 member survey drew 1,895 responses.
The rollout ran in three phases. Phase 1 in 2022 at Stourport and Droitwich. Phase 2 in 2023, which Lyngsoe describes as an expansion to seven more locations including Bromsgrove, Evesham, St Johns, Rubery, Kidderminster and Pershore. Phase 3 in 2025 at Redditch and Tenbury Wells. The council’s apply page names 11 live sites: Bromsgrove, Droitwich, Evesham, Kidderminster, Malvern, Pershore, Redditch, Rubery, St John’s, Stourport and Tenbury Wells.
Where it is not going
Three libraries will not get the model. Alvechurch is ruled out by private finance initiative costs, Bewdley by a lack of landlord approval, and Hagley by a low return on investment. Wythall remains under consideration, with discussions under way with Woodrush High School. That is a useful reminder that an open-access rollout is a property and contract problem as much as a technology one: a reader on a door needs a landlord who will let you fit it.
The published figures do not all agree
Anyone trying to reconcile the sources will hit four mismatches. The council papers reported on 4 October 2026 give 11 of 23 libraries, while Lyngsoe’s case study describes a network of 21. The council’s page lists Redditch and Tenbury Wells as live, then separately describes Bewdley, Redditch and Tenbury as part of “the next planned stage of Libraries Unlocked for 2025” with pre-implementation work in progress, which sits awkwardly beside the report that Bewdley is blocked by landlord approval. Something has changed there and neither document says what. On hours, the membership section of the council page says 8:00am to 8:00pm Monday to Saturday, while the section covering the seven locations that went live in 2024 says Monday to Friday. And Lyngsoe’s own case study heads its second phase 2023 but says in the body that the programme expanded in 2024. Malvern is named as a rollout site without being assigned to a phase at all.
None of that undermines the savings figure. It does mean a reader comparing this scheme against their own authority’s business case should go to the council papers rather than the summaries.
What the kit costs
The reported papers give the saving but not the capital cost, and that is the question worth asking. A useful benchmark exists next door. On 28 February 2022 Oxfordshire County Council awarded Bibliotheca Ltd, the other major supplier of UK library RFID systems, a contract with a total value of £541,740 to replace end-of-life self-service RFID kiosks across its 44 libraries. The term runs from 1 March 2022 to 28 February 2027, five years with an option to extend a further three, and the award notice describes a phased replacement with the first stage covering 10 libraries representing 69% of total in-county kiosk usage. It was procured through ESPO Framework 350_19 Library Solutions and Systems, Lot 1A. ESPO is a public sector purchasing organisation owned by a group of local authorities, and its frameworks are the standard route councils use to buy this class of equipment without running a full tender. Brighton and Hove City Council awarded Bibliotheca under the same lot for a different scope.
So the shape of the market is clear enough: two main vendors, one framework, and a replacement cycle measured in half a million pounds for a large county network. More named deployments with real numbers attached sit in our case studies.
A saving and a loss at the same time
Carol Brown, Worcestershire’s head of library services, told the panel the programme had “met its objective of increasing library opening hours” and that “We delivered just over £300,000 of staff savings through Libraries Unlocked”. She also offered the caveat that makes this a story rather than a press release, acknowledging that some customers would still prefer more staffed hours: “We know it’s not everyone.”
That tension is real. The hours RFID has added are hours with nobody at the desk. For a commuter who could never reach a library by 5pm, the trade is obviously worth it. For a reader who went to the library partly for the librarian, it is a loss dressed as a gain. Worcestershire’s answer, in part, is programming: writing groups, language groups, Adult Learning and U3A classes, school visits, cyber security courses, NHS baby and vaccination clinics, Age UK digital support, police drop-ins and Mencap support sessions all run during Libraries Unlocked hours, delivered by partners rather than library staff.
“The support has been responsive and collaborative, and the impact of Libraries Unlocked has been positive. It’s helped us reach more people, stay open longer, and offer something that genuinely fits the way our communities live. We wouldn’t have gone ahead with Phase 2 and 3 if we hadn’t been really impressed.” Kate Holford, Service Delivery Manager, Worcestershire Libraries
Worcestershire Libraries, part of Worcestershire County Council, runs 21 libraries including The Hive in Worcester, a fully integrated public and university library delivered jointly with the University of Worcester and described as the only one of its kind in Europe, plus a mobile library and two volunteer-run library links.
The next move is demand rather than hardware. Library managers are now targeting 13 to 17 year olds, with a new advertising campaign starting in Kidderminster aimed at people who do not currently use the service. Councillor Josh Robinson, cabinet member for communities, thanked library staff for the work. The HF kiosks and the door readers have bought the hours. Filling them is a different problem, and no reader will solve it.
