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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Many libraries, including Berkeley, are declining to put the name of the book or even the book's ISBN, its international standard book number, on the microchip implanted in it. They're using a unique bar code number instead, one that would have to be hacked out of a library's circulation database to connect it to a specific title. That's not just to assuage the privacy concerns of readers. For inventory management, libraries need to track individual copies of books and not the words between a given book's covers.
"Many libraries feel to protect patron privacy you should keep the information on the tag to a minimum," says Becky Anderson, a former librarian who is the marketing manager for 3M Library Systems, a company that has sold about 100 of the RFID systems currently operating in libraries around the world. "A publisher might put an ISBN number on a tag that they're selling to Wal-Mart, but a library wouldn't find that useful."
"The ISBN number is not terribly useful," agrees Gene Rollins, the assistant director for systems and technical services at the Harris County Public Library in Houston, Texas. Harris County has chipped all the video and audio cassettes in its collection and has plans to chip its 2 million books as the price of the tags continues to drop. The reason: All 150 copies of a popular title in stock at the library, like "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," have the same ISBN. "For us to be able to use this we need to track it down to the copy level. So, the ISBN number doesn't really get you anywhere," Rollins says.
But even if individual libraries, like Harris County or Berkeley, are careful not to put the title of the books on the chips, instead embedding each book with its own number -- a number not shared even with other libraries -- privacy advocates still have concerns. To them, opening the library up to RFID means opening it up to function creep. The numbers used aren't interoperable between libraries now, but does that mean they will never be?
Right now, retailers are using RFID only to manage relatively large shipments of goods moving through the supply chain. The cost of the chips still makes it prohibitive to enact the futuristic dream of wiring up everything from toothpaste to individual shaving cream bottles to every paperback book. But as the tags get cheaper, new books could arrive at the library with the ISBN already encoded in them by the publishing industry.
"Right now, those tags are about as meaningful as a bar code. You walk past a reader that picks up those tags, and it's just a jumble of numbers. But I am concerned that librarians are not thinking long term," says Beth Givens, the director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, who herself is a former librarian. "What if the publishing industry adopts RFID and in doing so encodes the ISBN number. Now you've got a tag that is revealing meaningful information."
But librarians argue that there are very real privacy gains to be seen right now through RFID. Would you rather self-check "The Infertility Survival Handbook: Everything You Never Thought You'd Need to Know," or share your most intimate concerns with the librarian behind the checkout counter?
"When I was a teenager and I was figuring out that I was gay, I could not go to the library and check out a book about it, because some other human being was going to see that I was doing that," Griffin says. "And the same thing holds true for people who have medical conditions and people who have financial problems. For a certain portion of our population we've increased their privacy."
Griffin reports that since the library announced that it was planning to introduce RFID, the only concerns about the technology raised by patrons have been with regard to health issues: Would the antennae embedded in the book be emitting something that they'd rather not have coming their way? The librarians in Berkeley say that they haven't been able to find anything in the relevant literature that suggests so.
