Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.