Watch a virtual 360-degree tour of BookBot library retrieval system

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.”

When books are returned they go into the nearest available bin that has space. This should (in theory) minimize retrieval time for the highest-circ books, which should gradually work their way to the front of the system.

MARC is a terrible tool for cataloging books (from a UX perspective). We supplement the MARC data with additional (subscription) info that includes book cover images (turns you you can…), first chapters, summaries, and tables of contents. This is a huge help in terms of evaluating a book before checkout in situations like the one you describe. But it’s certainly no substitute for picking up the book.

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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It’s not terrible per se – it’s certainly fit for the purpose it was intended. Even with its current weaknesses relative to computerization, as far as metadata architecture goes it has a lot of flexibility. I guess my problem is not with MARC so much as it is with AACR2 / RDA cataloging, which values documenting reality over providing utility for users. Both aspects are important, and I think that usability gets short shrift in traditional cataloging.

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?

Well usually there was only one ISSN, but there might be more than one OCLC number. Back in the day, that was fairly common, because the bibliographic record describes the item, and if the items are different formats… It’s the sort of thing that happens when you dogmatically follow the rules without thinking of the user interface. Let’s face it, original cataloging is usually done by pedants, which is a good thing, when it isn’t taken to extremes.
edited to add. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”, but I feel no shame in admitting that my mind is small compared to the contents of a research library.

I thought it might be a bit better, but I guess there is still all that ‘wasted’ space for corridors, apart from the space directly between the shelves. Mobile stacks don’t have to be closed off - I’ve used a few university libraries where they are open. The library at EPFL is one, which is a fun place in all kinds of ways:

https://www.google.com/search?q=epfl+rolex+learning+centre&tbm=isch

I can see that the bookbot makes a lot of sense, and logically is the right thing to do. But part of the library experience is walking in for one thing and coming out with something completely different. A used to know a guy who was a big fan of the oversized section - he liked that so many different topics were squeezed into a few shelves.

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