Library Owl

As a SLAISer, it's strange to visit a city without seeing its public libraries.

Seattle Public Library (whole building)

Circulation Desk with the book conveyance overhead.

A short clip from YouTube of how Seattle Public Library automatically sort their returned books by RFID.

Circulation is the most visible library activity for patrons. Most people in Taiwan believe that library service is all about circulation. This belief is also deeply rooted to some of older librarians. Some personal observation in Canada and USA arose my long discontents towards my job as a circulation librarian in Taiwan since it's a low-ended job with little satisfaction. I would only call it a "job" instead of a "career" that I would like to keep doing for the future.

For libraries in Canada and USA, although circulation is a large part of library service, they apply lots of part time workers to finish the chores. They would not put a librarian with MLIS degree at the counter to do such things. Seattle Public Library is one of the few libraries in the world that use RFID to automatically sort returned books and lower the labour of circulation service. People can return their borrowed books through the conveyence and then the books would be returned and sorted by RFID sensors. Unfortunately, RFID tags are still relatively too expensive comparing with its predessor, barcodes.