Libcabinet manual
8
Important information
There are some important things to understand before using Libcabinet, to ensure it works as
designed.
Do not overfill
The RFID reading shelves can read books from shelves only if placed correctly. If you fill the
cabinet up all the way, patrons returning books may place them creatively, which can lead to
items not being recognized.
Tag placement
As with any RFID tagged material, items in Libcabinet should have tags secured to books in
different positions. If all tags are placed in exactly the same position in each book, they will
interfere with each other, causing incorrect reading.
We recommend tags to be placed in at least three different positions on the inside of the back
cover of each item.
Material considerations
Do not fill the cabinet with too many CD’s or DVD’s without testing the reading thoroughly. The
CD and DVD disks contain metal in the material itself, which makes the RFID reading much more
difficult than from books. Depending on the quality and positioning of tags in disks, the number of
disks that the cabinet can read varies.
SIP connection
The cabinet needs a SIP connection to work. If you wish to place the device outside your library,
you need to make sure your firewall allows the connection from the cabinet to your SIP server.
The cabinet does not work in offline mode. If a SIP connection is lost during a patron session, the
patron is allowed to finish the session and items checked out / returned will be recorded locally.
This local cache of items is the automatically updated to the library system once the connection is
restored.
No new sessions are allowed when there is no SIP connection available, because patron identities
cannot be verified.
Theft prevention
Because the content of the cabinet is only read when the patron closes the door, items taken out
of the cabinet can no longer be written to. Thus, the security bit in the tags needs to be turned off
before the cabinet is used. The cabinet will also disable security bits of returned items
automatically. The cabinet is not intended to be fully theft-proof.
