Australian Uni's Underground, Robot-Staffed Library 46
angry tapir writes "As part of a $1 billion upgrade of its city campus, the University of Technology, Sydney is installing an underground automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) for its library collection. The ASRS is in response to the need to house a growing collection and free up physical space for the new 'library of the future', which is to open in 2015 to 2016, so that people can be at the center of the library rather than the books. The ASRS, which will connect to the new library, consists of six 15-meter high robotic cranes that operate bins filled with books. When an item is being stored or retrieved, the bins will move up and down aisles as well as to and from the library. Items will be stored in bins based on their spine heights. About 900,000 items will be stored underground, starting with 60 per cent of the library's collection and rising to 80 per cent. About 250,000 items purchased from the last 10 years will be on open shelves in the library. As items age, they will be relegated to the underground storage facility. The University of Chicago has invested in a similar system."
Books? (Score:5, Insightful)
What are these "books" you speak of?
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Printouts. But I suppose for some classes of books you need to see the actual physical object, including whatever has been added since it was printed.
Re:Books? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm sorry, the disregard for books in these responses is unbelievable.
Sure, if one is studying engineering, mathematics or computer science one may question the necessity of having a massive collection of books in a library and wonder why it wouldn't be better to have just the latest data available online.
However, as it happens, these aren't the only things one studies at university. If you are doing history, the social sciences or literature, your degree involves a lot of open-ended research that may take
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Robots are our friends (Score:1)
Sometimes they like to slash and maim the books
but
Robots are our friends.
Re:Did anyone else read this (Score:5, Funny)
as a library for banned (underground) texts, and get all excited?
Next an underground text ban treaty?
Come to UTS (Score:5, Funny)
Learn engineering! [i.qkme.me]
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Nice.
Some background to this recent picture [abc.net.au], for the non-locals.
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Copyright is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Why in Finagle's name wouldn't you just convert to digital and keep the originals warehoused in dry storage, sans the robot overlords? Much easier to search, more quickly available, less likelihood of unsuspecting librarians being selected for "testing"
Oh right Copyright law is 40+ years behind technology. How silly of me
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There is a simple reason for this. Once you buy the book, you own the book and the only cost you then have is the housing of the book.
A large number of the books a university would need a digital copy of, you need to license said copy. This incurs a yearly fee and ends up costing a small fortune.
Am I the only one who thinks... (Score:5, Interesting)
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One of my favorite things about the library at the university where I did my undergrad was that the shelves where they sorted books that had been returned before placing them back where they went were out in the open. Any given day I could walk by and browse through a couple thousand books that had been returned that day or the day before--a snapshot of books on every topic that people thought were worth reading (or, at least, worth checking out).
I think there's a lot of value in "transparent" libraries.
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There's a lot behind this comment that is really important. Sure, you "can" do the same thing with an electronic view of recently returned books - but you have all sorts of crazy privacy implications. If you read on-site in a traditional library, you don't need a name associated with a book to browse the shelves and see what's related, you can anonymously put it in the returns without your identity ever being associated. And it's a lot more casual and discovery-oriented: A lot of times I would walk throu
No, you're not alone (Score:2)
Looking up a book, then browsing the ones next to it is great research strategy.
To some extent you can gain a similar ability if the library catalog allows you to browse the titles "on the shelf" (in this case, of course, they wouldn't physically be next to it)... but it's still not the same as being able to pick up the next title, flip to the table of contents, and see if it's relevant. This problem isn't limited to automated systems... many large or special libraries require you to request books individua
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The new library at EPFL in Switzerland is much better. They have a fancy building above ground, some of which houses books. But most of them are kept in stacks underground, so they're tightly packed
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"People who perused this book also perused..."
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Self-reinforcing. Start with an empty 'related' database and a huge library of books. The first person browsing leaves a distinct fingerprint on the database, because the second person 'sees' the first's trail, and follows it. The joy of a traditional library is there is no path trod into the browsing experience, every discovery is fresh, no matter how many times it's been done before.
To get an idea of how it works out in practice, check out the completely bonkers amazon reccomendations for super-low-t
80? (Score:2)
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Yeah, 'cause it unheard of that an above-ground library on top of a mountain could be lost: ANU Astronomy 2003 http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~rjp0i/mso/library_interior2.large.jpg [virginia.edu] Disasters happen.
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Fire and shelving melt/collapse, no substantial water involved. Once the fire fighters left fighting the fire coming up the mountain they did not come back until at least a day later... we were busy fighting fires in the 500+ homes that burnt down that same day (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Canberra_bushfires [wikipedia.org] and http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~rjp0i/mso [virginia.edu]). The point was not that it flooded, but that the collection was lost to an unforeseen event. Put it in a basement and it can be lost to flood,
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Came on to say this. Details can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_University_Library [wikipedia.org]
Video footage of it in action can be found on youtube eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thKAS3CPz_c [youtube.com]
Photstream of one of these in action at UBC... (Score:2)
Photstream of one of these in action at UBC... [flickr.com]
University of Chicago (Score:1)
The University of Chicago has already just done this [uchicago.edu].
Macquarie Uni been there done that '12 (Score:1)
Vertical vs. Horizontal (Score:2)
Of course, stacking books horizontally to take up the same amount of shelf space might be just as bad with the compressive stress on pages (ink) at the bottom of the pile. And just the act of removing the the