Library adopts RFI
Remote scanning technology tracks books and worries privacy advocates

By Matthew Hirsch

The San Francisco Library Commission gave its cautious approval Oct. 2 to radio frequency identification, a little-known technology the Public Library intends to use to track the materials in its collection. Library officials speaking to the commission about RFID portrayed it as essential to the library's three-year strategic plan, but so far the public response to RFID has been much more skeptical.

Since the plan was first made public a month ago, library patrons and various advocacy organizations have begun questioning the necessity of the million-dollar investment. RFID involves embedding a microchip in library materials and using a low-power radio signal to track them on a central database.

Another concern is that RFID tags on library materials will contribute to a world of pervasive wireless tracking. After all, this is the stuff that makes automobile tracking possible today and that Wal-Mart hopes will be attached to all its product shipments in the next two years.

"The RFID solution is emblematic of the real problem at the San Francisco Public Library – a tech fetish that has led to a totally dysfunctional building," Christian Parenti, a library patron and author of the new book The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror, told the Bay Guardian.

Parenti, whose research for The Soft Cage included work at the tech-heavy Main Library, said the library really needs $1 million to purchase more books and a large sorting room to better handle inventory – not RFID. Even if RFID works as promised, Parenti warned, it would also have a "corrosive effect on the culture of dissent.... The problem with creeping surveillance is not only the politics of this or that technology but the politics created by the sum total of all technologies."

The Public Library's interest in RFID stems from its potential to improve inventory control and ease checkout. City librarian Susan Hildreth swears it's the next generation in scanning technology (see "Title Tracking," 9/3/03). She had been calling for outright approval of RFID but agreed to change the wording in the strategic plan to call for a consideration of RFID because of the various concerns raised about the plan.

Hildreth floated the idea of hosting an informational forum on RFID at the Main Library, to be cosponsored by the California Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She later told us the event would take place before the Library Commission approves funding for RFID next February.

Deborah Pierce, executive director of the San Francisco-based nonprofit Privacy Activism, told us she would participate in any public forum on RFID. Pierce joined Doug Loranger, a representative of the San Francisco Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union, at the Oct. 2 Library Commission meeting to criticize the RFID plan.

"It's much too soon to be implementing this system, [because] they haven't thought of all the implications," she told us. "There was nothing in that plan about privacy at all. It was about convenience for patrons and time savings for librarians."

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