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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.
Great idea, but grad students are still cheaper. :)
RD
...and that's how it begins
And I thought I was cool when I found my book using the Dewey Decimal System :-)
You can pay them much less and they could be more attractive!
Do I get a little readout that says:
Result 1 of about 3. Search took 25 minutes
That's interesting. I love browsing for books... walking along the racks just looking at the titles and picking out those which sound interesting. Only problem, you're walking with your head tilted, which gets sore after a few minutes.
It'd be cool to have the robot walk along and you'd see the image rotated 90 degrees, and the tiles scrolling by. Heck it'd be nice to get that on a video at the end of the aisle so you wouldn't have to go into the crowded aisle itself.
Libraries are where RFID tags will really shine. The robot wouldn't need a camera, just run run along the shelf with a sensor until it picks up the right tag. As for placing a book in the wrong place, smart bookshelves that read the RFID and record all the books that are there, and report any that are out of place.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Does it tiptoe about going
when it's not looking for a book?What about a pair of hornrimmed batgirl glasses with nice shiny chain, does it have that?
Can it read me a story, and make me think I'm there?
If not, it's not a proper librarian in my book.
Hmm, OTOH I'm thinking this whole robot thing may be going somewhere, after all.
sigs, as if you care.
Bah! In my day, we actually read the books...and we LIKED it!
More details here: original pdf, converted html.
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.
The real reason for building this robot was to catch students making out in the basment. (most libraries' stacks are in the basement where the lights are low and access is limited to staff and few lucky/adventurous types) :)
When I was in HS I worked at a library and stacks was my favorite area. One time I heard noise in the far corner and went to investigate. I was clumsy stepped on something on the way there - really cute catholic schoolgirl and my metalhead friend (who also worked there) emerged. Needless to say, both looked embarrassed. They made up some lame excuse and left. Now if I had that robot, I probably would have had the whole thing on tape
1. All the good stuff is in the basement.
2. Catholic schoolgirls are WAY pervy.
3. Women are turned ON more if there's a chance of getting caught.
4. Having long hair and playing metal in your car could actually get you laid! (in the 80s)
"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.
I'm one of the biggest geeks out there, and electrical engineering is my life but I still know that printed books are very valuable. Just how long does digital media last? CDRs, 5 years. How about digital memory, like PROM - 50+ years. And what guarantees that we will still have the tools to easily read these even 20 years from now?
Paper books are awesome. Although it's not typical in a library, you could find a century-old book and read it. If it degrades there is still mostly legible information. The data is not destroyed by impact, large electromagnetic fields (including nuclear/EM bomb) and the data can be wired directly to our brains via the eyes.
Books are pretty friggin' neat.Program it to read all of the books and upload them to an online server.
Then it can retire and take up a hobby, like infinite looping or virus collecting.
Around the sixties, the Library of the Delft University of Technology had a "bibliofoon" system, where people could find the books they want in a catalog and then enter their number in the ordering system. A red light would start burning at the right shell, and personnel would start taking the order.
:-) Must have been marvellous.
Once arrived at the right spot, they would get the ordered book and put it on a large spiral slide that was central to the building. This slide was connected to a sliding table ("lopende band", how does that translate?) which ended up in the catalog room, so that people could take their books and check them out.
The most fun part about this system was that people would keep the slide clean by simply taking a slide
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