Hello,

We are in fact using Koha in conjunction with a 3M RFID solution. Here are the basic details:

We initially started with a 3M RFID solution back in April 2008 when our new facility opened - our current facility houses over 40,000 items in our local holdings. We have 2 RFID based SelfCheck stations for the public, as well as 2 SmartChute stations for automatically checking books in when they are returned.

We are also part of a larger, shared catalog with 15 other libraries in the northeast area of the state of Kansas, meaning that all 15 libraries share their collections with one another - this comes to a total of approx. over 300,000 items in the shared catalog.

We initially started using Sirsi/Dynix as our automation system, but found that the operating costs were too high for the level of support we were receiving. The consortia made the decision to move to Koha, in order to enable us to receive better support, and to keep costs down. We are currently using Liblime (http://www.liblime.com) as our support/development partner for Koha. While I can tell you that the overall experience with Koha has been very good, there are some points to consider in using RFID:

RFID does work with Koha. That being said, some things are not currently working as intended:

Holds did not initially process as expected on the SelfCheck machines (this has been corrected with modifications from Liblime)
Meaningful transit/exception slips from the SmartChutes currently do not print (ie, send this item to this library - being corrected by Liblime)
The 3M specs for SIP do not accommodate UTF-8 (Joe Atzberger has mentioned this previously in this list)
General lack of meaningful error messages when problems arise on the SelfChecks. (usually there is an "undefined error" style message displayed).

All of these are derived from "live" production scenarios. While we are the only public library in the State of Kansas to have implemented an RFID solution (and a 3M one at that) I do feel like we are positioned in a good place for the future, and the relationship with our development/support team at Liblime has been favorable. Their continued assistance and modifications of the Koha system to suit our needs has been a benefit, and one of the main reasons why we feel that our decision to migrate to an open source automation system has been a wise one.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have further questions.

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Liz Rea <lrea@nekls.org> wrote:

The Basehor Community Library in Kansas is using 3M RFID systems with
Koha. It's not perfect, but it does work.

Liz Rea
Network Administrator
Northeast Kansas Library System

On Dec 16, 2008, at 2:02 PM, Joshua Ferraro wrote:

> Hi Oliver
>
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 11:10 AM,
> <Oliver.Bernuetz@canadabusiness.ca> wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> Does Koha feature SIP 2 support? We're looking at RFID so I need to
>> know this.
> Yes, Koha 3.0 supports SIP2 via the OpenNCIP libraries
> (http://openncip.org) and has been successfully connected to
> Self-Checkout systems like those by 3M, Authentication with search
> services like VDX(tm), as well as other SIP2 applications. I'm not
> aware of any Koha libraries using RFID, but I don't anticipate any
> major barriers to that provided the implementation relies on the SIP2
> 3M spec.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
> CEO migration, training, maintenance, support
> LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
> jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS
> _______________________________________________
> Koha mailing list
> Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz
> http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

_______________________________________________
Koha mailing list
Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz
http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

--
Cheers,

___________________________________
Thatcher Rea
Technology Services Coordinator
Basehor Community Library
Email: trea@basehorlibrary.org
Phone: 913-724-2828