RFID and Media Items

[Mark Hughes]

This has cropped up in numerous conversations recently, generally with
people asking 'what's the best way to deal with these, maintain
relatively high item security and keep self service'.

Well, it is something that needs to be addressed in the spec, but I
don't have the perfect answer.

DVD and CD RFID labels do not perform as well as book ones in my
experience, and there is a tag 'masking' issue in particular with some
multiple disc sets (mainly due to the packaging layout). You can kind
of work round this a bit by tagging both the disc and inlay as an
associated 'set', but even this is not ideal

I have no personal experience of using 'booster' tags as offered by
some suppliers, but have heard mixed anecdotal tales.

Safers are widely offered and used, but they are not generally
intergrated fully into the transaction on the self service unit, so
effectively need to be placed outside the library security gates which
brings all sorts of associated issues.

There are a few 'jukebox' type dispensers appearing on the market -
http://tiny.cc/ZsVXr , http://bit.ly/2UpDdA , but that could be quite
a drastic & specialised solution, possibly out of the reach of many
libraries.

Any thoughts / ideas out there?

Thanks

Mark