Everyone is familiar with the standard checkout system just about every library in the country has, or has used until recently. Take your book from the shelves, take them to the Circulation Desk or Self-Checkout machine, scan the barcode, magnetically desensitize the book, and be on your way. This is a magical security system as VERY FEW people actually know what the security device in the book looks like.
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| Here they are! We hide them in the spines, most of the time. Please don't use this info to go ripping through library books... |
They are cut to size, obviously, and snuggled in differently for paperbacks, but that's the general idea. Unless you want a mangled book, it's hard to desensitize the book or remove the magnetic strip yourself and still sneak out of the library without arousing suspicion. That being said, it is a more time consuming processes, humans have to manually re-sensitive the books every time they come back in, but it is quite secure, save for when people just don't return the books. "Lost" books are generally books we have given up trying to get back from a patron, so we send the fines to a collection agency who then hunts them down for us. Yes, WE WILL GET YOUR MONEY. We're poor, seriously, we need it.
Well, despite this tried and true security system with the only major flaw of being a bit time consuming having provided quite well for, let's see, at least twenty, thirty years, perhaps longer, my library has decided it's time to move into the big leagues! We're going to use these things!
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| Each one of these is a sticker to be affixed to the back cover of a book. It takes three seconds to place, guess how long to remove? |
Yup! Stickers! But wait! They're FANCY stickers! Oh yes, these stickers come at an individual cost of 10-26 cents PER STICKER! Because they have been imbued with MAGIC! Also known as being sensitive to radio frequencies that allow the information embedded in the tag to be read without contact to the actual reader.
I will grant you, yes, it is a nice idea to have the barcode and security scanned at the same time. That does cut down on time. Yes, it is nice to not have to open a book to scan it. Yes, if all the things that my library wants this new technology to do happen, it will be excellent. But, at every turn I encounter more ridiculous frustration and misunderstanding about why this new system, when it goes live, is going to be a foul disaster that they just aren't anticipating.
I am seeing a lot of text here. It's making me self conscious. Here, have a puppy. I'll expand on this project another time.
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| Way too adorable... |
*The Runner, at least at my library, is responsible for carrying the stupidest looking phone I have encountered lately while executing any number of tasks. The phone's purpose is to make the runner immediately available should someone need a cart, more AV to check in, or some question answered. Unfortunately, the phone generally doesn't work, or when it does, I have no carts to give or AV to be checked in, making the whole exercise a bit protracted and silly.
Besides that, I empty the book drop, so I take all the books that have been hastily shoved into the small slot in the wall out of the bin they fall into and organize them by floor onto an insufficient number of carts in an oven of a closet at the front of the library. Humid days are particularly uncomfortable. My organization is generally undone by the runners later in the day, leaving me with a mess of a cart to check in the next morning, since it doesn't take me four hours to empty book drop. In between checks, I check in books in the basement, after dragging all the carts across the lobby, through a too narrow door, into a hasty elevator, back across a basement and around two corners only to put them into an Out going lane to be dragged back to somewhere near where they came from. (Talk about efficiency, eh?)
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