R-LIM: an Affordable Library Search System Based on RFID

With a large volume of materials today's libraries carry, locating the exact position of materials is time-consuming. This is not true just for poorly managed libraries, but also for well maintained libraries. In the former case, the problem is rather serious. Even though a material is somewhere in the library, if we cannot locate the material, the fundamental roles of the library may be challenged. In the latter case, one still needs to go through a tedious shelf searching process to locate the material. In this study we propose an affordable RFID based library management system named R-LIM which eases the process of locating books in the library. In an earlier version of R-LIM, expensive RFID antennas had to be placed on every shelf to acquire location information. In this new version, we replace the antennas with inexpensive tags to make the system more affordable. By associating book-tag IDs with shelf-tag IDs through periodic tag scanning, we can identify the exact location of the book we are searching for. This paper describes the localization algorithm of R-LIM, and explains how it can be integrated with other parts of the system