Provide all costs purchase or lease, installation and maintenance of self-service machines in Devon libraries (RFID machines or self-service kiosks)
Please itemise the costs and provide the costs for each library and say when each library had self-service installed. Provide all costs from the time that those costs started.
Provide additional IT costs for the implementation of self-service machines, such as the cost of integrating the Library Management System with the self-service machines.
In order to confirm or deny that Devon County Council holds the information you have requested an officer would need to manually review the financial records held for all purchases of equipment in libraries over the last six years. They would then need to cross reference these records against information contained in purchase orders, invoices and other contractual documentation to enable us to ascertain the level of spend on each particular element of what has been request. Also as the Council is only required to keep information for 6 years and as we believe that some of the equipment was installed prior to that date, it is highly likely that the detailed information has been destroyed.
The Council estimates given the number of records that would need reviewing, this would take greater than the 18 hours we are obliged to spend answering a Freedom of Information request. For this reason it is believed that Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act applies (cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limits)*.
In the interest of providing advice and assistance, if you were able to narrow the scope of your request by limiting it to cover the average costs of a single machine, we would be happy to review this again. Alternatively we may be able to review the costs over a particular specified time period (such as twelve months prior to the transfer of Library services to Libraries Unlimited) or provide a couple of examples of RFID machine costs.
*Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 – ‘Cost of Compliance’, public authorities are permitted to consider the time taken by them to extract, locate and retrieve the information requested by a particular requester, and refuse those requests where these activities would take in excess of 18 hours to complete.