NextGen: They’re RFIDs, Not “Arphids”

Recently, I sat through a conference call with an RFID applications company. Like many libraries today, we were feeling them out. And like any vendor, it was trying to sell us on its services for our libraries.

I have to admit, it’s a little frustrating. You’ve got the Ars Electronica set on one side, trying to make “arphids” into artworks. Led by, for instance, Bruce Sterling’s frequent clarions to bring the radio frequency identification tags into wider artistic and cultural significance, the arphid-crowd seems to be grasping for an upper hand on cool. The question I have is: What turf for the small-town librarian?

Middle ground?

Like the tide of public Internet-ready computer labs in the 1990s, change is coming, and RFID technology also might change us for the better. But so far, this technology isn’t a real easy fit for libraries, and it will probably cause some serious chafing before we wear it in.

On that conference call, for example, I had a number of questions that were glossed over or weren’t answered to my satisfaction. But in a roomful of folks just learning the basics of RFID and its uses, it wasn’t really worth it to back-pedal and unpack a bunch of my paranoid assumptions about this new technology.

Some of the glossed-over questions went like this:

Me: How do we keep our books from getting hacked?

Them: You buy the locked RFIDs, of course.

Me: How do we keep folks from using our books to track our patrons?

Them: That’s not our problem, and it shouldn’t be yours either.

Me: Are we liable if someone hacks our books to move viruses or malware into larger systems?

Them: You’re way ahead of the law on that one. Don’t worry so much.

New rules

But I do worry. You probably do as well. As librarians, we fall in the middle somewhere, wandering in the desert of the real (if you will) and in the tedious and fluorescent-lit realm of “responsible application.” We’re not milking the technology for profit or moving product, but rather we’re just trying to use RFID responsibly to serve our patrons better. But know this: every unanswered or poorly answered question will come back to bite us hardest because we have so much more responsibility than the arphid-artists and so much less money than the corporations selling RFID to us.

So, in the interest of our patrons, let’s try to remember the following:

1. They’re RFIDs, not “arphids.”
2. We really don’t know where this is going yet. After reading “The RFID Hacking Underground” (Wired, May 2006), I mentioned some of the possibilities of hacked books to my peers. They thought I was bonkers. Still, it’s a mistake to jump too soon in either direction.
3. RFID tags are still simple—and still pretty dumb. I’m sure there are many wonderful creative applications for this technology, and I’m sure you know that there is a very supple and burgeoning future for library ubicomp (“ubiquitous computing,” a concept that embeds computing into our environment). But as librarians, we don’t “play with arphids,” we work with RFID.
4. Sometimes our patrons, however, will play with (or prank, or worse) our RFIDs. Some will hack our books and scrawl digital graffiti on our records. Some librarians will panic.
5. Don’t panic!

Our time to lead

As librarians, we often scramble to patch together stopgap policies that attempt to treat all involved parties fairly, county by county, town by town, campus by campus, patron by patron. And too often we’ll eat it for everyone else at first and be labeled extremists of some stripe by local politicians for trying to improve services equitably with a controversial tool.

The same will be true with RFID. But this is an opportunity for us to lead. Glitches and burps will pass, and we will be the ones on the front lines finding ways to make it through the rough times.

Learn the facts, learn the technology, and learn how to hack it. Don’t be afraid to tinker, or to ask unsettling questions. Run a few “war games” to learn how not to act from fear in your own stacks.

As information gatekeepers, we must see that tools like RFID are used for the public good. If we keep our heads clear and our hands steady, we’ll make our own luck and steer our future toward much-needed examples of cool, quiet, techno-savvy shrewdness in a much too reactionary world.