Summer is upon us! This summer is a special one for CoALL as it is our 15^th Anniversary. Many of you were around for CoALL's founding on July 2, 1984. I'll bet you felt younger then -- but just think how much older and wiser both you and CoALL have become! Is it significant that CoALL was founded during the season of vacations and fun? Even if you only get a week or two of vacation, I hope you enjoy it so you can come back to your libraries and CoALL with renewed vigor, enthusiasm and willingness to volunteer. At fifteen, CoALL is still a very young organization. We certainly showed our youthful energy and vigor in the excellent Joint Meeting with SWALL in April. Let's make next year just as productive and fun but first let's all get a good vacation.

Vacations can offer valuable learning experiences for your professional life. I recently read in a hotel copy of USA Today about the future demise of barcodes. Since my library relies heavily on barcodes for inventory and circulation control, this caught my attention. It seems barcodes are to be replaced with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). "RFID is like giving barcodes a brain and a voice. RFID could mean the difference between going to a grocery store and having a checker scan your purchases one at a time vs. wheeling your entire cart past a receiver that would detect every item in a split second and ring up your bill. RFID could tell whether all the bags loaded into a plane's belly match all the passengers in their seat without having to move the bags or the passengers." I'm sure you can extrapolate these examples to a library situation.

The reason we may be replacing all the barcodes on our books in the future is that RFID has become cheap and pliable. The technology that makes this possible is that ink is now used in place of metal to print an antenna. The silicon chip that attaches to the antenna is the size of a coffee ground and holds about 110 characters of information (enough for call number, title, etc.) This is all interesting and exciting, but I'm waiting for the day when library books tell their user (with a beep, jolt, whatever) if they are overdue, misshelved or misplaced.

Enjoy your summer and see what new things you can learn to benefit your library.