[WEB4LIB] Librarian Bots To The Rescue!

[Sloan, Bernie]

Blake Carver said:

"They now have a robot that can move about inside a library and locate a
book requested by a user, take it off the shelf and carry it to a nearby
scanning station."

While the scanning and delivering content over the Web part is nifty, the
retrieval and delivery part is nothing new. According to one paper (the
first URL below) Cal State Northridge piloted such a project in 1990. This
paper also makes references to failed attempts as early as the mid 1970s (if
I am not mistaken, Ohio State University had one that interfaced with its
LCS circulation system around then).

http://www.ala.org/acrl/kirsch.pdf 

http://library.csun.edu/asrs.html 

http://mike.passwall.com/ars/wired/1/part0.html

www.sonic.net/~cotman/images/alss.pdf  

Bernie Sloan

-----Original Message-----
From: Blake Carver [mailto:carver.50 at osu.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 7:01 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Librarian Bots To The Rescue!

"In Remote Library Stacks, an All-Seeing, Scanning Robot"

Here's One from The NYTimes on libraries of the future, partially run by by 
robotic systems linked to the Internet. They now have a robot that can move 
about inside a library and locate a book requested by a user, take it off 
the shelf and carry it to a nearby scanning station. In the system's 
envisaged final version, a second robot at the scanning station would scan 
specific pages of the book that the user was interested in. The user would 
then be able to leaf through the book over the Internet from any location.

Here's the Realllllly Log URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/27/technology/circuits/27NEXT.html?ex=1025841
600&en=1f5771200b66974d&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA

This project is over at Johns Hopkins, and has A Web Site.
http://dkc.mse.jhu.edu/CAPM/



------------------------------------------
Blake Carver
Web Librarian
The Ohio State University Libraries
carver.50 at osu.edu
247-7424