- VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Home
to almost 2 million books and manuscripts, the Vatican Library has begun
a different way of tracking and identifying its massive and precious collections.
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- Starting last year, the library began inserting so-called
Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, computer chips in books available
on its open shelves as a way to find misplaced tomes.
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- More than 120,000 volumes line the library's public reading
rooms, and "when one book gets put in the wrong place, it's as if
it's gone for good," said the library's vice prefect, Ambrogio Piazzoni.
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- With this new technology, a library worker can pass a
wand-like antenna over the shelves and "if a book is missing or in
the wrong place, the antenna will sound an alarm to signal there's a problem,"
he said.
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- The library closes for a month every year just to go
through inventory the old-fashioned way: visually corresponding what is
on the shelf with a list of the library's collection.
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- When the project is complete, doing inventory with the
RFID system "will take just half a day," said Piazzoni. So far,
50,000 books have been tagged with the RFID chips.
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- The radio frequency tracking and identification technology
first appeared in the 1980s as a substitute for the more well-known bar
code label in tracking inventories. As opposed to the bar code, which requires
manually scanning an item with a laser, RFID can identify many items at
once, swiftly and up to 90 feet away. It is based on the same technology
that allows cars to pay highway tolls without stopping.
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- A reading device sends out through its antenna a low-power
radio signal that the chip -- in this case, inside a book -- receives.
The chip can briefly "talk" to the reading device and verify
"I am here and this is what my name is," said Piazzoni.
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- "We will also be able to tell how often a book gets
taken off the shelf to be consulted. This way a book that rarely ever gets
looked at can be put in the back rooms to free up space for a more requested
item," he told Catholic News Service.
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- According to the Public Libraries Association, RFID systems
are relatively new in libraries. A Jan. 23 article on the association's
Web site said that as of the third quarter of 2001 fewer than 50 systems
had been installed in U.S. public libraries, and most of those were branch
libraries.
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- The article said the University of Connecticut Library
and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Library are the only sites labeling
more than 1 million items each.
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- Although some U.S. libraries see RFID technology as a
way to make book checkout easier and faster, the application will take
on a different dimension at the Vatican since no books can be removed from
the Vatican Library -- except by the pope.
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- "We're the first to merge our extensive cataloging
system with this technology," Piazzoni said.
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- That means each book or document's catalog data -- such
as its title, author, number of pages, date published -- will be inserted
into the book's chip. This way even readers at the library can aim their
handheld computer at a book and get its catalog information without having
to reach up and take it down.
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- Copyright © 2004 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference
of Catholic Bishops http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/20040329.htm
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