Keep on swimming... and climbing...

Following on from Rachel's awesome information sharing about the appointment of FE Technologies as our vendor, and all the cool stuff that they can offer... as well as providing working examples of the tech @ other library services... there's more!

Your RFID Project Team is here to assure you that while it *may* seem like it's gone quiet RFID-wise from your comfy corner of library land, we promise that our proverbial duck legs are paddling away very fast and happily under the surface : )

Just to give you some exciting (yes, it honestly is very exciting!) details, here's what's a happening currently:

• At the moment Louise, Kate and Rachel are working away on what's known as a pre-tagging checklist.
• This checklist is basically a list of what we need to provide, and decisions we need to make so that FE can provide us with the ability to tag all of our collections (this is known as retrospective tagging or retrospective conversion).
• This includes things like providing a file of every single item we have in the library service, and deciding what fields need to be encoded on an RFID tag and lots, lots more.
• All of this is so that next Wednesday - yes, only just over a week away! - our amazing conversion stations can be delivered to us, all configured and ready to tag stock at Unley and Goodwood Libraries.
• FE will be providing a core group of us with training on how to use these stations, and from there we will be armed with all the info we need to train all  of you and figure out how best to roll out and roster the process. So stay tuned!

On a personal note, for me it is fantastic to be delving into a project that has been such a long time coming. Hanlie and I started talking about RFID way back in 2009/2010, which seems like a lifetime ago!

It is also great to be working again on a project that will deliver such a huge, positive change for Unley Libraries. The last time we got stuck into a project like this, it was the 1LMS transition and I don't need to remind you of how Unley absolutely blitzed at that! We did amazingly well and I know that we will do the same again...because we're awesome... and we know that even when the path is hard we focus on the end goal, and make our own fun to get there (chocolate and/or a random Michael Jackson dance/singalong over the PA system anyone?).

Yes, I know I tend to get a bit cheesy about this stuff but I really just want to share that changes like this one might be challenging but that's honestly a great thing, not a scary thing. There is nothing like knowing that we didn't just settle for 'meh' but instead we had a vision and made things better for our customers and staff. We're climbing the mountain and it won't be long before we'll be standing at the top, smiling and looking down. Okay, okay, I'll stop now...