London South Bank University is one of the oldest and largest in London with over 25,000 students from across the globe. Currently investing £47 million into their campus set in the heart of London one area of the University's three year strategic plan was to improve the student experience.

In the words of Ruth Moore, Deputy Director of the Centre for Learning, Support and Development, the solution for raising service levels in the library was, literally, 'staring them in the face':

"It was all about being part of the strategic plan to improve the students' experience. It's also about the cash point principle. You put your routine transactions through a machine which frees up your staff to deal with things that need a human intervention. We're always asked to do more with the same or less resource, so the solution is staring you in the face – RFID enabled self service"

The project was a first award for D-Tech as part of their alliance with the London Universities Purchasing Consortium (LUPC). For the University this meant that the preliminary stages of selecting a short list of suppliers, could be fast tracked as D-Tech had already fulfilled the rigorous evaluation process set by the LUPC tendering team of University purchasing and technical representatives. This was truly a speedy process taking only four months from tendering, to tagging of over 300,000 items, to implementation and students coming through the door at the start of a new term.

The University now has five of D-Tech's stylish, stainless steel 'Diamond' self service units, six bibliopad workstations, one single aisle hybrid (EM and RFID) gate, and over 3000 DVD and CD security cases.

Interoperability with the library's existing LMS system proved a challenge, Lise Foster, Team Manager, Systems and Learning Technology takes up the story:

"In the case of Millennium, the system does not support the ability to view and renew your loans from the screen and fines payments are handled by a proprietary API interface which must be purchased separately from Innovative Interfaces. D-Tech are continuing to work hard to implement this module and are overcoming many problems along the way to enable this service".

Efficient tagging of over a quarter million items was also crucial if deadlines were going to be met:

"D-Tech got the tags to us really quickly and lent us all the equipment to do the tagging which was great. D-Tech trained our staff and taggers, and we were all learning because none of us had any real idea of what it involved at all. We worked out the most efficient process by working with our taggers and we had to make absolutely sure that we had enough pairs of hands - it had to be done by the 5thSeptember, end of story. We couldn't turn around at the start of term and say "sorry it's not done." We had to have a staffed service desk anyway to allow students to return items that had been borrowed over the summer and not tagged.

Ruth is happy to offer her advice to other librarians embarking on the RFID route and the library is already playing host to a number of interested librarians from other Universities. She recommends keeping a pragmatic approach and always have a PLAN B contingency plus, "don't lose sight of your original objectives. There are always some absolutely fixed elements in any project like this and ours was the deadline for the start of term, given we were on such a short timescale from tender in May."

Alan Doherty, Library Manager at LSBU says: "So far, the real benefit of RFID is an ability for students to issue/return books without waiting for more than a few seconds allowing us to devote more time to enquiries. Issues are also up during evening non staffed hours".

The subsequent user feedback for the self service has been universally positive from individuals and through course boards.

And it's not all over; the library is planning to make use of the RFID to undertake a stock check during summer 2009.

The final words come from Ruth Moore "Given the scope of the project and the short timelines I would say it was relatively painless!"