What if it were possible to know the location of any individual book along the entire supply chain at any time, in real time -- or all your books, all the time --- individually and/or collectively, slice and dice as you will, by title, by author, by geography, by location -- in the warehouse, in the store, on the truck, in someone's briefcase who hasn't paid for it, back in the store as a return, at point of sale, being checked out of a library, sitting on the library shelf beaming that it has been mis-filed, sitting on the bookstore shelf as the last copy, and letting the retailer know to order more, the distributor know to send more, the publisher know to print more, the editor know to acquire more, the author know to write more?

The Auto-ID Center at MIT, with the support of more than 100 major global companies like Wal-Mart, Gillette and Coca Cola, has taken the lead in supporting the development of the hardware, software, and business modelsfor RFID. Kevin Ashton, the Center's Executive Director, provided a comprehensive overview of RFID. He gave a demonstration of how RFID works in the supply chain and retail environment and described the evolution of the tags, the process for developing standards, the approach to business models, and the response of major companies to this new technology.

Brian Green outlined the positive steps taken in Great Britain and Europe to educate the value chain about the potential importance of RFID use and to put together oversight groups of all concerned parties that can meet to agree upon standards and protocols going forward.

Deveron Milne of VTLS described his company's RFID solution for a number of libraries. Automatic check out and return are two of the major benefits of this new technology, along with activating alarms in the event of improper or accidental removal of volumes. In addition, inventory and shelf checks can be accomplished by use of a special reading wand passed along each shelf that recognizes every tagged volume. Because of the "circulating" aspects of library materials, which move continually in and out of the environment, as opposed to the one-time transaction in the retail environment, the price point for RFID tags already makes sense for library use.

Per Ohstrom of CHEP outlined the company's multimillion dollar operation of providing pallets with RFID tags to 100,000 customers in 38 countries. This use of RFID tags on palletsrequires "portal" readers at the loading docks and key warehouse locations to track the tag-enabled pallets and their content automatically, generating data in real time. This raises different issues than the use of RFID atthe individual product/consumer level -- in which each product would have a tag and a network of readers would be strategically deployed throughout each retail environment. Interestingly, CHEP itself uses RFID to manage the inflow and outflow of its millions of pallets as they moveamong producers, distributors, retailers and back to CHEP.