Using RFID Inventory Reader at the Item-Level in a Library Environment

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1. Introduction
―Technology seems to be changing our world – seemingly on the hour – and libraries and their needs are no exception.‖ (Narver, 2007). Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a wireless technology used to track, trace or identify an individual item or group of items. Libraries are fast growing adopters of RFID; the technology promises to relieve repetitive strain injury, speed patron self-checkout, and make possible comprehensive inventory. The number of RFID implementations in libraries have been increasing based on the advantages that the technology offers in managing library materials (compared to barcode system). In particular, barcode requires strict line of sight access, while RFID tags can be read through a variety of substances irrespective of orientation.


1.1 Purpose of the study
Hevner et al (2004) argued that the utility and quality of an artifact must be rigorously demonstrated via well-executed evaluation methods. This absence of a methodology to evaluate performance of the RFID library system has suggested that the research community has neglected testing in this environment. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to propose and execute a methodology to investigate performance of RFID library reader, that is, the inventory reader. Evaluation of key factors that may affect the performance of the RFID reader may provide a premise to suggest best practices to optimize the read rate.

1.2 Research question
This study considers the library as a suitable test setting as it provides a controlled environment with circulation of items. The research sought to investigate the following questions:
What is the read performance at selected angles of the inventory reader?
What is the accuracy of read rate based on the distance between tag and reader during inventory?
What is the optimal location for tag placement on books?
What is the effect of shelf material on the performance of the RFID inventory reader?
What is the role of interaction of factors on the performance of the RFID inventory reader?

2. Literature review
Performance testing is a methodology that examines the behaviour of a system under a particular workload (Bousquet, 2005). Evaluation has been a topic in general IS Research and is generally regarded from two perspectives, namely, ex ante and ex post (Pries-Heje, Baskerville and Venable, 2008) and (Klecun and Cornford, 2005). With ex ante perspective, candidate systems or technologies are evaluated before they are chosen and acquired or implemented, while for ex post perspective, a chosen system or technology is evaluated after it is acquired or implemented. This paper will examine a RFID Inventory reader from an ex post perspective.