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Beneath its tranquil surface, the Berkeley Public Library is rife with tension.

With management moving full speed ahead to install a controversial automated checkout system at the same time it has proposed laying off 12 mostly low level employees, privacy advocates fear Big Brother will soon be lurking behind the checkout desk and library workers are wondering if they will have a place in the fully automated library of the future.

“The library is a place for people to connect and communicate,” said Nick Nastick, a Berkeley library assistant for the past 16 years. “If we lose that we become just another industrial machine.”

Nastick is one of several librarians who doesn’t know if he will have a job come July when the layoff proposal, now before the library’s board of trustees, would take effect.

Facing a $1 million shortfall for the upcoming http://www.tm-supply.com/?p=27510 costo farmaco cardura http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ fiscal year and having reduced operating hours last year, Library Director Jackie Griffin has suggested overhauling Berkeley libraries. To cut down on workers compensation claims and close the deficit, Griffin has proposed layoffs targeted primarily at library aides and assistants the employees who spend the most time checking out books and stacking them on shelves.

Griffin assumes that check out staff will be in low demand thanks to the introduction of Radio Frequency Identity Devices (RFID), scheduled to be implemented in July.

Nearly every day for the past several months library employees have sat behind glass doors on the third floor of the main branch sticking palm size antennae on the library’s 500,000 volume collection.

When the roll out is complete, instead of waiting for an employee to swipe each book through a barcode detector, patrons will be able to check out their items in one simple motion by sweeping them over a table top reader.

“It’s state of the art,” said Doug Karp of New Jersey based Checkpoint Systems, the largest producer of RFID technology to libraries and the supplier to Berkeley and about 140 other libraries worldwide. Checkpoint products use proprietary technology, only functional with Checkpoint systems, meaning that Berkeley could face risks if the company raises prices or goes out of business.

And hi tech doesn’t come cheap. Berkeley is paying $650,000 for the system at a time when budget constraints are being blamed for lost jobs.

The library, which operates independent of the city administration, has seen the cost of employee benefits surge. And after voters rejected a tax hike on the ballot last November, there is little hope for a sudden infusion of revenue.

“The intent of RFID was never to take people’s jobs,” said Griffin. “People Buy is erythromycin over the counter http://oohlawee.com/noroxin-costo/ Purchase don’t want to hear this, but the reality is either we cut staff positions or cut back the book budget, those are the only things that are left.”

Without RFID to improve workplace efficiency, Griffin added, the library would still have to lay off employees and further reduce hours.

RFID, first used by farmers to track cattle, has been around for over 30 years. However, the recent mushrooming of applications, including tagging prisoners in Michigan, luggage on airplanes, merchandise in Wal Mart warehouses, and possibly middle school students in Sutter, Calif., has sparked concerns from privacy advocates.

“We don’t argue that the use of RFID right away is a humongous privacy invasion. We are worried about the society we will end up with 20 years down the road when the technology is ubiquitous,” said Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the San Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation.

RFID tags encode items that can then be tracked by specially made devices. In libraries, the system speeds up checkouts and makes inventory easier, library officials say.

Proponents of RFID say that privacy concerns about the systems are exaggerated. They argue that the reading devices function only if they are within about a foot of the tag and that even if someone managed to read the tag all he would see is an insignificant serial number.

“The number is meaningless,” said Mark Roberti, editor of RFID Journal, an independent publication. “Unless you have access to the library database and know what book corresponds to the serial number, there is no privacy breach. Someone with a powerful reader, even if he doesn’t know the title of the book, Tien postulated, could follow the patron to other locations with reading devices, like Wal Mart, the airport or an ATM, and gather more information about the patron.

Tien also questioned industry claims about the limited power of reading devices and fears that future devices will have longer range.

“The trajectory of the technology is what we ought to be concerned about,” he said.

Peter Warfield, head of the Library Users Association in San Francisco, fears that if progressive cities like Berkeley and San Francisco move ahead with RFID, the industry will use it to deflect concerns of privacy advocates.

“They want to push their way here so they can turn around and tell other cities, ‘Look, there’s no need to worry,'” he said.

The battle against RFID in San Francisco led the Board of Supervisors to hold up that city’s purchase of an RFID system. Now with the issue returning to the fore this week as the Library Commission reviews its budget for next year, Berkeley’s Griffin thinks out of town privacy advocates are using Berkeley as a proxy in their battle to keep RFID out of San Francisco.

“They’re trying to discredit Berkeley before San Francisco votes,” she said. “For Peter Warfield and Lee Tien, the real issue is the San Francisco Public Library, not us.”

Griffin, who was library director in Eugene, Ore. when that city started down the road to RFID, pushed, with the backing of a volunteer employee committee, for Berkeley to adopt the system two years ago as it was opening a larger central branch with no money for new hires.

Griffin has high hopes for Berkeley’s system. She expects self checkouts to jump from 15 percent to 90 percent and worker’s compensation claims to decline.

While library directors who instituted the system in other cities rave about its performance, the results have varied. In Santa Clara, which in 2000 became the first city on the West Coast to switch to RFID, but has not yet attached tags to CDs and DVDs, Library Director Karen Saunders said they have achieved a self checkout rate of 45 percent.

In Eugene, Ore., which like Berkeley has RFID installed on all its items, self checkout rates hover just below 100 percent, said Margaret Hazel, the library’s technology manager.
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