Have Your Finger Ready for Check Out
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 8/1/2005
Library cards can always be shared, but not fingerprints. It's much harder, after all, to let a buddy borrow your hand. Which is exactly why Naperville Public Library in Ohio is switching from cards to finger-scan readers in order for patrons to log on to the library's computers by themselves.
“There was a fair amount of card swapping among children whose parents had not given them permission to use the computers,” says Marl West, deputy director of the Naperville Public Library. “So I was looking for a solution and stumbled across a notice about the finger scan software.” West approached a couple of biometric firms that offered the technology, which reads points on a finger and translates them into a unique logarithm used to identify individual patrons. The library eventually contracted with US Biometrics, which agreed to install the software and reader devices this fall for $32,000 plus an additional $8,000 for a four-year maintenance plan. West found it far less expensive than the $320,000 it would have cost, he says, for the additional staff people necessary to monitor the computers over four years.
West says that scanning will be optional, although patrons who refuse to offer their fingers for scanning will then need a librarian to log them on the computers.
While some residents appear not to mind the new technology, the idea of capturing physical data in libraries worries some groups, including the American Library Association (ALA). “At what point are libraries stepping over the line and becoming intrusive and making patrons not want to use them,” says Kent Oliver, chair of ALA's Intellectual Freedom Committee. “We're very concerned about the privacy issues surrounding this.”
Naperville is only the second library in the country to implement biometric technology. The other institution, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library in western New York, only has the biometric system installed in one branch. “I love using it,” says Ann King, Erie Buffalo's support services administrator. “But at one of our branches, the staff was not sold on it so we pulled it.”
West is hoping for better results, and expects 10 percent of Naperville's patrons, about 8,000, to sign up for finger scanning. And he believes that number will grow as users become more comfortable with the system. “In a sense we're just replacing the bar code people get with a card with the bar code on the tip of their finger.”
