Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/04/watch-a-virtual-360-degree-tou.html
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I get the need for this sort of thing, but many of my favorite memories in college were finding books I wasn’t looking for on the way to find the thing I was.
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Awesome. I see this could be used on many other applications.
The worker can still make a mistake and put the book on a sector different from what’s displayed. Imagine some computer vision system could help with that.
big ideas need pictures and/or illustrations before searching
guaranteed to prove more productive
more technical than amazon’s look closer software
can wholly understand that…
the british library used to expand their shelving by four miles
each year so they say
Reminds me of this, round about the 1-minute mark…
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The most impressive thing is that there hasn’t yet been sufficient need to develop an “audit the whole system” function, which would be almost trivial. Just scan each and every bin and make sure what you expect to be there is actually there.
I date myself by saying this but my first job was filing folders for an office. It seemed about 10 percent were misfiled. Accuracy seems like the main selling point for this.
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My local library network uses a shelf browse system, and it’s excellent. For libraries in the network but outside your town, that you might never visit in person, you can browse what else they have alongside the title you’ve searched, and then have the titles reserved and sent to your local library.
Yep. Y’all made a really good effort, and asked a lot of people to test the virtual browse. I think its great.
The scale and efficiency of that system may be impressive, but I prefer the personal touch of the good ol’-fashioned “Mr Darcy” library bot from the movie Robot and Frank.
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Here in Germany some pharmacies use similar robots. Sometimes they have a window so you can peek at the fetcherbot in action.
I guess that 9x density is relative to normal shelves. How does the bookbot compare to rolling stacks?
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I think mobile shelving doubles capacity compared to traditional stacks, so the bookbot is 4.5x that.
If you’ve already made the decision to close the stacks and not allow any patrons to browse through the books on the shelves in person, then there’s no real downside to eliminating traditional shelving in favour of something more compact. I’d hope there’s a way to access a virtual shelf list catalog so you can still scan through everything in a certain call number range.
The downside is that seeing a shelf list catalog is no replacement for seeing the actual books in terms of being able to tell which ones might be useful to your research. If I was using that library, I’d be requesting a ton of books and sending 90% of them back, and that would eat up more time. But if the library can afford to buy more books with the money its not spending building more stacks - a worthwhile trade off, I think.
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Very similar to State of Utah’s Dept. of Alcohol and Beverage Control inventory, storage and retrieval system. As IT support, I was taken on a tour of the facility and watched in real time. It’s pretty impressive being in the presence of all that liquor and beer. It’s pretty sad being in the presence of all that state controlled liquor and beer.
Not sure how this system works, but with Utah’s DABC system, humans never touch the actual bottles or cans of alcohol. Everything is scanned on pallet, stored and retrieved as needs, loaded onto shipping trucks and away they go to the state owned liquor stores. I’m sure its much different with books.
When a book is refiled, does it go back to the same bin it was pulled from, or the next available bin with room in it? As Glauring says, it is probably the optimum solution for a closed stacks library. Also true that the MARC record is no substitute for holding the book. I remember doing an ILL for somebody just to have him hand it back to be returned within 30 seconds. It was not evident from the catalog description that this book on “military aviation” did not include any information on “naval aviation.”
I wouldn’t say that MARC is terrible but…at a fundamental level it dates to the late 60s and that shows in the way that it is very sparing in its use of computer resources. Heck they didn’t have space for a character set that included pre-composed diacritics. So instead of ö you have ¨o. But heck, I have spent a fair amount of time poring over old DTIC records in COSATI. At one point, somebody asked “why are they in all caps?” Because in the 50s, people didn’t even use a separate character for upper and lower case letters. In the Fielddata character set, you just had an “everything that follows is upper case” character and a “everything that follows is lower case” character. Which people rarely bothered with, so the default was all caps.
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I’m just happy that these days the practice is to have ONE bib record for all the formats of a Journal. Because nobody ever said “I only want this if it is on microfilm.” But PLENTY people have said “I want to see this article, where do you have it? On what format?”
What I don’t get is separate ISSNs for print and electronic. Really, who came up with that?
