The Robots Are Not Taking over Libraries
December 14, 2016
I once watched a Japanese anime that featured a robot working in a library. The robot shelved, straightened, and maintained order of the books by running on a track that circumnavigated all the shelves in the building. The anime took place in a near-future Japan, when all paper documents were rendered obsolete. While we are a long way off from having robots in public libraries (budget constraints and cuts), there is a common belief that libraries are obsolete as well.
Libraries are the furthest thing from being obsolete, but robots have apparently gained enough artificial intelligence to find lost books, however. Popsci shares the story in “Robo Librarian Tracks Down Misplaced Book.” It explains a situation that librarians hate to deal with: people misplacing books on shelves instead of letting the experts put them back. Libraries rely on books being in precise order and if they are in the wrong place, they are as good as lost. Fancy libraries, like a research library at the University of Chicago, have automated the process, but it is too expensive and unrealistic to deploy. There is another option:
A*STAR roboticists have created an autonomous shelf-scanning robot called AuRoSS that can tell which books are missing or out of place. Many libraries have already begun putting RFID tags on books, but these typically must be scanned with hand-held devices. AuRoSS uses a robotic arm and RFID scanner to catalogue book locations, and uses laser-guided navigation to wheel around unfamiliar bookshelves. AuRoSS can be programmed to scan the library shelves at night and instruct librarians how to get the books back in order when they arrive in the morning.
Manual labor is still needed to put the books in order after the robot does its work at night. But what happens when someone needs help with research, finding an obscure citation, evaluating information, and even using the Internet correctly? Yes, librarians are still needed. Who else is going to interpret data, guide research, guard humanity’s knowledge?
Whitney Grace, December 14, 2016
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