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Remote-Controlled Robot Could Browse The Stacks
An anonymous reader writes "A Japanese team of researchers has developed a robot that could help browse for books in a library by receiving instructions via the Internet, a team member said Friday. The robot, a wheeled vehicle measuring 50 by 45 centimeters with a digital camera, mechanical hand and arm, follows orders received through the Internet." This reminds me somewhat of Sonoma State University's (quite different) system profiled a few years ago in Wired.
If I know the title and author of the book I'm looking for, I can find it just as easily, and odds are I can outrun this little robot. Now, if I ask the robot a question (IE, What causes Parkinson's Disease?) and it brings me back the most relevant book on that question, that'd be awesome.
Why do the simple things get the same billing as the complicated things?
.NET; it sort of misses the point.
Why is it significant that the orders are "received through the Internet?" Shouldn't the navigational and computer vison aspects be overarching?
It reminds me of Visual Studio
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and generally better to use RFID tags on the books, and then some lowly student like me who's trying to pay his ever rising tuition to file the books?
Just something short ranged, so it won't track you out of the library.
Or do I not know what I'm talking about?
Bah! In my day, we actually read the books...and we LIKED it!
this could also lead to increased life span for the books since they wouldn't be exposed to the oils on peoples hands.
meep
Two big differences: Technology is much more fragile. Tear a page out of a book, and you haven't lost much. Put a gash in a DVD, and you've done a lot more damage. Secondly, you can open any book and view the contents, the main limitation being knowledge of the language. It takes specialized equipment to view the contents of say, a DVD, and then to be able to decipher it's content - and THEN deal with the language.
Try triggering on a shelf and you'll get readings from a few thousand books, and still not be accurate enough to tell you if a book is in exactly the right place. A book placed on a shelf that's three spots higher than it belongs is still a lost book that might take years to notice, and result in frustrated attempted borrowers not knowing where to start their search...
Wouldn't it be easier just to design a machine that could scan all of the books. Why waste time with a robot, now that computer memory can hold millions of books?
"Today, the Authors Guild is saying that the publishers don't have the right to let Amazon do this." -- Slashdot, Oct 25, 2003 - Amazon's Book Search Hits a Snag
Why speculate when we know the answer?
But then again, I could be wrong.
The fact that standard organisational systems (Dewey or Library of Congress)are employed in all university libraries makes the job so much easier.
If you want to find research materials on North American Indians of the Plains. Instead of looking in a card catalogue, you would get yourself up to the "E" Stacks and roam around the 78's to 99's. Easy.
Sometimes, I think that Librarians have more to tell us about organising information than we have to tell them.
Clearly, digitizing the text is a faster and easier solution.
Well, you'll need some expensive equipment to digitize an entire library. The fastest way is to rip the books apart, and feed all the pages into a fast scanner. No problem, unless you want to use the books again. Most of the books in libraries are expensive, out of print books, so you probably don't want to destroy them. Clearly this option is out.
So you're left with scanning by hand. This is an arduous process. Especially for larger books, pages are difficult to scan properly thanks to the binding. It will take a hundred years to do this by hand. Because the sloppy scanning, OCR is a nightmare; so you'll have to either spend another century correcting the OCR, or leaving the pages as sloppy images. Neither sounds appealing.
Suppose you've done it, and put every book online. Now you hire lawyers to protect you from the publishers and authors who's work you copied and distributed illegally and are now suing you. As this is Japan, you'll apologize for putting the university in such a shameful position and resign in disgrace, never to work again. Your children will be ostricized in school and will hate you for it.
The robot is a much better solution.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Where I work we have a robotic stockroom. Its product density is amazing compared to the one we had where people worked. It takes dramatically less time to actually have a part in you hand, particularly odd parts. And it's really interesting to boot. We stuck a video camera on it the day it opened and got some cool footage. So what does this have to do with libraries? Simple I'd give up lurking about in the stacks to have the actually books take up less room and be easy to find. Now this page turning is a waste. They need to loose the camera and just bring me the book! Also I prefer books to digital for most things. (except long tables of numbers).
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.