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Story of the day:
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VATICAN-LIBRARY (UPDATED) Mar-29-2004 (560 words) xxxi
Vatican Library begins using computer chips to identify volumes
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"We're the first to merge our extensive cataloging system with this technology," Piazzoni said.
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.
END
Copyright (c) 2004 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method, in whole or in part without the prior written authority of Catholic News Service.
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