So much for fun in the stacks....
According to this Wired article, one byproduct of Chicago State University's nearly $40MM library reno is that students will no longer be allowed in the stacks. All shelving and pulling of books will be done by robotic "pickers". This is a technology that has been evolving rapidly in warehouse settings and has the potential to be efficient and, at least in theory, cost effective.
Generally, the stacks can be closer and higher (potentially several stories). Better yet, if implemented as is seen in major warehouse projects, books can be shelved "dynamically"...that is, books checked out more often would be in prime/fast locations and The Starr Report would be in some dank corner. Better yet, the system can learn as it goes...refining its algorithms and becoming more efficient.
On the other hand, please read: Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Edward Tenner, 2004). I suggest this may also result in the modern grocery store phenomena...if/when there is a power/technology failure, no one can function any longer. You literally can not make purchases at a grocery these days when their "system" is down...forget the fact that no one can make change...nothing has prices on it anymore. Good for tweaking pricing for arbitrary and capricious reasons...problematic otherwise. I predict many major libraries will follow this path as well...and will be utterly useless whenever there is a "failure".
Technology is such fun.
Labels: bookish, random bits, rantishness
posted by LuxMentis @ 5:46 PM
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2 Comments:
I am opposed to this method of cataloging and storing books. The reason may be stated simply and in one word: proximity. When I browse, I find other books of interest to either side of the book I seek. This process is a discovery. The browsing process is necessary in research, as well; searching through an index and locating other books peripherally attached to the main topic are necessities. So much will be lost by automation.
I would miss standing in the stacks.
Absolutely! *Some* of this *might* be addressed via algorithms ala Amazon's suggestions...you could be "shown" books related to the one you seek. That said, it completely lacks that nature and value of browsing...poking through indexes, etc. The beauty of the Dewey Dec. system is that "grouping" of like matter...the analog version of Amazon's algorithms.
If/when these systems become ubiquitous, what we will need is a database version of Enc. Brit.'s, Synopticon. For those who have never seen it, it is effectively a conceptual cross-reference index for EB's, Great Books of the Western World (aka, "Great Papers by Dead White Western Europeans"). You can look up "concepts" such as "love" or "terrorism" or "ethics" and get a quick cross reference of what the 54 men of GB thought on the subject (Sophocles to Freud). 90% of my undergrad was "soft science" (soc/crim and phil)....the Synopticon was an *exceptional* reference (in the dark ages, pre-Web as we know it). It will not, of course, completely fill the proverbial bill...and is unlikely ever exist on the 1MM+ book scale...but we shall see.
It is, I suspect, another step down the road that Baker feared in his Discards article (my favorite article is here). The salient point here being that when card catalogues were jettisoned, so was (potentially) years and years of notation and annotation that were added to the cards...often a great resource as I can attest to from personal experience. Again, there is nothing that prevents database driven CC to allow notation (though few of them do so)...and it is extremely difficult to use one during a power or system failure...
It also reminds me of Oxford Univ.'s sale of there First Folio...because they had a copy of the Second (and therefor "better")...many years later, Sir William Osler rallied a great deal of money to repurchase the same volumes from Sotheby's and put them back where they belonged.
Institutions have a bad habit of acting upon what appears to be a short/mid-term gain while largely/completely ignoring the broader implications. Anyway, my ranting notwithstanding, I agree...this is likely to be a bad thing for students and researchers....and casual browsers.
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