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.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

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/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Bellaire is a small city in Harris County, Texas, sitting inside the Houston metropolitan area. The library work falls under the FY 2026-2028 strategic plan, a three-year roadmap of priority projects built around five focus areas that officials set out in April 2025: community, governance, infrastructure and asset management, public safety, and land use and zoning. Those areas were restated at a council and staff planning workshop on 24 February 2026.

Circulation did most of the work

In a library RFID project the tags and the readers are rarely the expensive part. The cost sits in labour. Every item in the collection has to be pulled off the shelf, opened, tagged, programmed with its item identifier, checked against the catalogue record and re-shelved. Repeat that across a collection approaching six figures and the nine-to-twelve month estimate stops looking pessimistic and starts looking like arithmetic.

The standard way to compress it is to stop treating the shelves as the source of stock and let borrowers deliver it instead. Tagging on return is a well established retrospective conversion tactic: rather than working systematically through the stacks, staff tag items at the point they come back through returns, so everything in active circulation gets captured without anyone fetching it. Bellaire’s loan periods, up to a month and in some cases two, meant a large slice of the collection was already out on loan and arriving back at the desk in a steady stream.

“A lot of books were checked out, because you can check out books, some for a month or up to two months. So, as they’re coming in, we’re tagging them. That has really sped up the process at the library,” Arrowood said.

The trade-off is that tag-on-return only reaches what circulates. Reference stock, local history and anything that has sat untouched for years still has to be worked through by hand, which is usually where the tail of a conversion project goes.

What is installed

Alongside the tagging, the library has completed an RFID security gate, three staff checkout units and one fully operational self-checkout kiosk.

The security gate is the pair of pedestals at the exit. It reads tags as items pass between them and alarms when an item’s security status has not been cleared at checkout, which is what allows a tagged collection to drop the separate magnetic strips that older library systems relied on.

A staff checkout unit is a flat reader pad on the circulation desk. Because RFID reads several tags at once, a member of staff can put down a stack of books and issue the whole pile and clear its security in a single action, rather than opening each item to scan a barcode. A self-checkout kiosk does the same job for patrons without staff involvement: the borrower identifies themselves with their library card, places their stack on the pad, and the kiosk issues the items, clears security and prints a receipt.

An inventory wand is the piece still to arrive. It is a handheld reader swept along a shelf that reads a whole run of spines in seconds, without pulling a single book, and reconciles what it finds against the catalogue to flag mis-shelved items and identify what has gone missing. Shelf-reading that used to be a periodic, labour-heavy exercise becomes something staff can do on a round.

What has not been published

Bellaire has not stated the air interface, frequency band, tag supplier or data model behind the deployment, so none of that should be assumed.

As general industry context rather than a statement about this project: public library RFID is predominantly HF at 13.56 MHz to ISO/IEC 15693, with the data written to the tag usually following ISO 28560 so that items stay readable if the library later changes system supplier. UHF, that is RAIN RFID to ISO/IEC 18000-63 in the 860 to 960 MHz bands, has a smaller but genuine presence in libraries, largely because the longer read range suits wand-based inventory, at the cost of trickier tuning around dense stacks of paper and foil-stamped covers.

The project is also not formally finished. A second self-checkout kiosk has been installed and staff are working to bring it live, and the inventory wands are still to be implemented. Arrowood said the work will be complete once all systems are running, including the wands, which is the point at which a tagged collection turns into an actual inventory capability rather than a faster way to issue books.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

51,000 transponder labels, applied one book at a time

“For that we bought 51,000 transponder labels and glued one into every book,” library director Ulrike Weil told the local Wochenblatt-Reporter. “That was only possible with the help of volunteers.” All quotes here are translated from the German.

Every label also had to be paired with the existing catalogue record and loaded into the library system, with the collection staying in circulation throughout. This is the part of a barcode to RFID migration that the vendor literature never dwells on. The technology is mature and the installation is measured in days; the conversion is measured in person-months. Somebody has to open every single item, position a label and match it to the record. At 51,000 items, done largely by volunteers, that is a serious piece of community effort and it deserves naming as the reason the project happened at all.

Two self-checkout terminals and a return shelf that discharges itself

Borrowers hold their library card up to one of the two new self-service terminals, place the books they want on the pad and take a printed receipt. Returns go into a return shelf at the entrance, where items are discharged automatically and the return appears on a monitor straight away. Staff at the issue desk work from the same RFID system.

A new security gate at the entrance sounds an alarm if an item passes through without having been issued, so unbooked media get spotted and booked out on the spot rather than walking out of the building.

The city is explicit that no personal data is stored that would allow anyone to reconstruct what an individual borrower has been reading. That is worth saying loudly, because it is the most common public objection to library RFID anywhere in Europe, and the answer is always the same: the tag carries an item identifier, not a person.

The money, and a per-item benchmark

Total project cost came to around EUR 63,000, of which 80 per cent was funded by the Landesbibliothekszentrum Rheinland-Pfalz, which supports digitisation work in the state’s libraries. That leaves the city itself carrying roughly EUR 12,600.

Run the published totals against the item count and the whole project lands at a little over EUR 1.20 per item, and that figure already absorbs the two terminals, the security gate and the return shelf as well as the labels. That arithmetic is ours rather than the city’s, and every collection is different, but as a back of an envelope benchmark for another small municipal library sizing up the same move it is a useful number to carry around.

Industry context: what Pirmasens has not published

Pirmasens has not stated its operating frequency, air interface, data model or supplier, so nothing in this section is a claim about this particular deployment. It is general practice in European library RFID.

Library RFID in Europe is overwhelmingly HF at 13.56 MHz to ISO/IEC 15693, also published as ISO/IEC 18000-3 Mode 1. The short read range that would be a limitation in a warehouse is a feature on a library counter: the shelving behind the desk does not get read by accident, and a stack of books laid on a pad reads reliably as a set rather than picking up whatever else is in the room. The reason that stack reads in one motion is anti-collision in the air interface doing its job.

The data model is standardised as ISO 28560, with part 2, which holds the encoding on the tag itself, the common European choice. That standard is what lets a library change supplier later without re-tagging 51,000 items a second time, and given that the conversion labour is the expensive part, that is not a minor consideration.

The return shelf can discharge an item without a member of staff touching it because the same tag carries both the item identifier and the security bit, the EAS or AFI flag depending on the implementation. Discharge and de-securing happen in a single transaction. That one property, one tag doing both jobs, is precisely why libraries walked away from barcode plus a separate electromagnetic security strip.

Early results

“We are already recording fewer thefts, and beyond that the new technology means a noticeable easing of the workload for our staff,” said Denis Clauer, the city’s Beigeordneter, or deputy mayor.

Weil reports that the public has taken to it without much fuss. “The new system is being very well received,” she said. “People are very open to it and view the development positively.”

Read more at https://www.pirmasens.de/leben-in-ps/buergerservice/aktuelle-nachrichten/flexibel-und-zeitsparend-stadtbuecherei-wird-digitaler/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.