Overall Benefits to RFID

As stated, for relatively little money invested (about $0.40 per item or so) a library system can basically hard-wire their entire collection to be read by the receivers.

An RFID system tends to be a lot easier to understand for patrons. Self-checkout stations are becoming more and more popular and the requirements to use an older, magnetic-strip-and-barcode-scanner machine can be confusing. What used to be a case of:

• Making sure you're scanning one item at a time
• Making sure you've got the material's barcode facing correctly.
• Sliding the material slowly across the checkout
• Trying to get the scanner to read the barcode
• Waiting for the demagnetizer to work
• Hoping it actually worked

Is now a case of

• Put three items on a checkout pad.
• Wait patiently.
• Walk on out.

This streamlining makes the checkout process much smoother. Additionally, since the material's metadata and information can be retrieved very easily, a library worker can easily re-shelve a material by scanning it quickly to find where it belongs in the library.