We’ve been working to make borrowing books easier than ever.
Over the past few years we’ve been inserting RFID* tags into all our books. That’s many hours spent inserting tags and programming (we loved every moment of those stickers). Long story short, this means when you borrow a pile of books, you no longer have to find and scan every barcode in each book to check them out.
![](https://libraryblog.wordpress.hull.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Jon-SS-machine2-1024x673.jpg)
Our new self-issue machines can read multiple RFID tags at the same time as soon as you place the pile of books on the machine, making the whole process quicker and easier.
![](https://libraryblog.wordpress.hull.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Book-return-768x1024.jpg)
We’ve also made it possible to reserve on-shelf books. Just find a book you want via the Library Search and reserve it, whether it’s on-loan or on-the-shelf. If it’s on-loan it will be reserved for you when it’s returned. If it’s on-the-shelf, a member of library staff will fetch it for you and place it on the reserved-items shelf. You always get an email when it’s ready to collect. We’ve fetched 5,518 of these on-shelf books in the first trimester** alone!
![](https://libraryblog.wordpress.hull.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Carrying-books-683x1024.jpeg)
* Radio Frequency Identification
** Trimester 1 was 27 September 2021 to 31 January 2022