Robots Retrieve Your Books At U. Chicago's $81 Million Library 202
kkleiner writes "The University of Chicago's new $81 million Joe and Rika Mansueto Library is being referred to as the library of the future. You enter the library and find there are hardly any books, just a large reading room with computers. The library's 3.5 million books are stored inside 35,000 bins stacked within 50 foot tall racks in a massive 5-story chamber underneath the library. When you ask for a book an automated retrieval system involving huge, computer-activated robotic cranes finds the book you want, delivers it to the circulation desk, and eventually puts it back underground when you return it." The age of the personal-shopping library robot is getting closer and closer.
Hey, I have one of those too! (Score:3)
It's called a Kindle...
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NONFREE
NONFREEDOM
DOH!
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How much would it have cost to Digitize everything for the Kindle? Contract Google and reCAPTCHA and get everything digitized. It'd probably fit into a single 3.5" hard drive. Books really don't making sense in this situation. Especially spending 81M on a big storage unit. What happens when the water barrier fails and takes out the entire library?
Yeah, a good argument! (Score:2)
Yeah, a good argument!
My parents' personal library weights about 2 tons. There's no way it could be evacuated in time to save it from, say, asteroid strike (they live in a remarkably geologically stable zone).
However, my own library fits a USB thumb drive which I can easily carry with me everywhere. And with the help of my solar charger I can charge my eBook reader (once or twice a week should be enough).
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Re:Hey, I have one of those too! (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the Internet have a copy of "Proceedings and plans for the completion of the Chicago, St. Paul & Fond du Lac Rail-Road, from Chicago to Oshkosh", published in 1859? (http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/3577896) No? Didn't think so. How about "Sturiella minor: a fossil plant showing structure from the Carboniferous of Illinois", a UChicago student thesis from 1924? (http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/4512895) No? Didn't think so.
If your response is "who would ever need to know that kinda crap?", you don't understand the first thing about academic research. If your response is "why not just digitize these and put them online?" then you'll be glad to know that they built a digitization lab as part of this new library to do exactly that. But that work takes time. Years.
The Internet is great, but some things aren't on the Internet. Some things are very very hard to put on the Internet, due to copyright issues, age issues, and manpower problems. The Internet, for all its glory, often actually *reduces* the variety of information available: have you noticed that when you Google something, the first hit is Wikipedia, and the rest of the page is people plagiarizing Wikipedia? It's crucial that information networks from the past be integrated into the network of the present, or we stand to lose our history.
For more on this, read "Rainbow's End" [amazon.com] by Vernor Vinge.
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I call bullshit. Copyright has expired on these books: prove your claim by posting a link to them.
I have a feeling your ebook site has a page for the book titles, but not the books themselves.
get off my lawn (Score:2)
and take that new fangled alien contraption with ye, ye devil.
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But they have built the ultimate robotic buggy whip.
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Along with the fact that not everyone can afford a kindle, or the price tag on some books. It's not like I can spend $100 on a book just for a college paper, or for research developing a solution for a comp sci project (like an assignment to create a web-app for medical research.) Then there are the many journal archives one might need access too that some places can't afford to scan.
Yes, the Kindle is awesome, but lacks the pass around features paper books have (it's a friend/family tradition with books) b
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Eighty one million dollars can pay to scan a lot of books.
Probably with enough left over to subsidize Kindles, iPads, etc.
What moron would even think of doing this kind of thing?
Big Deal (Score:3, Informative)
We have had one of those at Sonoma State University for about 10 years now.
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1) Your library has 1/4 as much storage.
2) Your library doesn't look like this:
http://www.uchicago.edu/features/20110520_mansueto/ [uchicago.edu]
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So now we know why the cost if education keeps outpacing inflation by double digits. Because idiot administrators have no interest in education, rather, they wan to build giant monuments to themselves.
I look forward to the day that major university after major university goes bankrupt due to their profligate spending on crap like this.
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Why would you want a library to look like that? There's way too many people in that room.
Back when I was in college, when I went to the library to read stuff, I found chairs or tables that were nestled in the stacks of books, where there was no one around. It was easy to find such secluded spots to study in a big library where all the space was devoted to stacks of books, not some fancy automated system and an annoying "reading room" where you have to listen to everyone's noise.
At least, however, the read
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I forgot to mention the libraries here have armed police stationed at them to keep the peace and keep gangbangers from starting stuff.
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"We have had one of those at Sonoma State University for about 10 years now."
What? One of those papery blogs Granny talks about?
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Indeed. These kinds of robots are seriously old hat - they've been around a couple of decades now.
Ambivalent (Score:4, Insightful)
Wandering the stacks and reading random books is fun.
Going to the location of a book and looking at the books around it for other options is a necessity.
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If you had a list of books (say electronic editions or scanned) and if you could order them in the same way that they are ordered on the library shelf, then you could browse a book's neighbourhood just the same.
alot of books are cataloged by a hive mind (Score:2)
nowdays you can predownload cataloging data partially filled out
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It could in theory be duplicated online.
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Robots are cool.
Wandering the stacks and reading random books is fun.
Going to the location of a book and looking at the books around it for other options is a necessity.
What we need is to combine these options. -Riding- the robot into the stacks and perusing! Especially if the robot were shaped like ponies!
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Setting up physical stacks so you can browse through them is a hardware solution to a software problem. Your average Slashdot reader could easily modify a library search engine so when you click on a book, it shows you a sidebar containing several books a semi-random distance away in Library of Congress number.
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I'd be very curious to see how this system deals with peak load. Say, for some class a new assignment is given. You often find that all the students will start getting books in that area.
If it takes 5 minutes for every request, could see some big issues starting to pop up. I wonder if other students taking items from the 'bin' will muck things up? Are the bins even sorted by category, or just randomly?
Or even ignoring people trying to get books in the same area, in busy operating conditions, will this slow
Re: slowing down to a crawl (Score:2)
I don't think your scenario of a bunch of requests aimed at a particular area of the stacks is even necessary to cause bottlenecks and delays in patrons getting materials from the stacks. There will never be enough robotic book pullers to match the amount of material that can be obtained by individuals walking through the stacks.
I am guessing the UofC has closed stacks otherwise this robotic system wouldn't make sense. Closed stacks, IMHO, suck like a tornado. They eliminate the serendipidous finds that y
Great for retrieving a specific book (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Great for retrieving a specific book (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup. Nothing like taking a book off the shelf, flipping through a few pages, putting it back, taking it off the shelf, flipping through a few pages, discovering something you want to read more about, and adding it to the back-breaking pile you have on the nearest table.
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Yup. Nothing like looking for a book and, finding it missing from where it should be, having to search for five feet in each direction just to make sure some random browser didn't just shove it back into place.
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The library online catalog where I live has a feature called "search nearby on the shelf" that shows you the books around your search result. If this kind of data is already being indexed, it seems like a simple matter to make a virtual representation of the shelf that you can browse with a mouse or a touch interface. It's not the same as being there but it can be approximated.
It may be approximated, but it's a poor approximation.
The strength of being able to browse nearby books isn't just looking at the titles, but in being able to pick one up and flip through it and see if it's interesting. It's not quite the same if you see an interesting title, then have to wait 10 minutes for the robot to retrieve it for you.
Since they say each book bin holds around 100 titles, they could simulate this by putting the books into LC classification order in the book bin and letting you browse t
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The books in the robot aren't going to be the ones you want to browse on the shelves--they are the endless bound serials, government financial statistics, etc. Moving them makes room to browse the stuff you want in the main library stacks.
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My question would be, why aren't these things in digital form? If you've ever done any research, you'll know the signal to noise ratio can be quite low. It usually takes me scanning through 15-20 works before I find what I want. And to have to wait an hour to get your collection doesn't work.
I say, have the stacks if you want the physical copy. But everything should be digitized and searchable.
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Maybe because it's much more impressive on the evening news for viewers to see pallets of bound printed government reports, statistics, and budget proposals being shipped to eagerly awaiting citizens and legislators. Seeing a box of CD-ROMs schlepped around would be boring. Showing a video of the government website and the link where you can download the documents would be even less impressive.
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> Then the interfaces to library catalogs tend to be crap too.
This is mostly because the world of university-level library management systems (a.k.a. integrated library systems) is heavily dominated by Voyager which was from Endeavor Information Systems and now is in the hands of the Ex Libris Group. There are a number of open source alternatives, but you can't seriously expect a big institution to use anything that doesn't require a huge contract for installation and support.
having worked with voyager (Score:2)
it's been so long i've forgotten most of it. but essentially there are a tangle of tables for various parts of a book record, and a bunch of proprietary indexing garbage. hell i even wrote a layer of python to talk to it... it interfaced with a layer of java that itnerfaced to an ODBC driver... anyways. they were using Oracle and Unix as a backend, but i didnt get to play with that part.
the other staff used to tell me that before they bought it, they went through this survey process; all the librarians and
And this is why tuition rates are out of control.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is very cool, but come on! People are struggling to afford college for their kids, and universities waste money like this?! Sorry, we have to raise tuition another 5%, we have to pay off this robotic library. And people complain about the oil companies...
Re:And this is why tuition rates are out of contro (Score:5, Informative)
The library cost a hefty $81 million, but the alternative was expanding the old library's capacity - and that was estimated at $67 million. So for $14 million, the university gets a brand new library with all the prestige and sex appeal of this new, high-tech approach with lower operating costs to boot. And anyway, the library's namesakes donated $25million, an amount that was probably increased by the prospect of the donator's getting to slap their name all over this exciting new building. What I'm saying is that this was a no-brainer for the university in terms of cost/benefit.
Now, whether you want to trade a building full of beautiful old books which you can peruse at your own convenience, and staffed with generally knowledgeable bibliophiles, for a mechanized building with 5-minute delay times on book requests and far fewer human employees... that's not so straightforward I hope.
Re:And this is why tuition rates are out of contro (Score:5, Informative)
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Robotic libraries allow a higher packing density (more books per cubic meter), save on climate control (no need to compensate for opening / closing doors, it's underground so well insulated, no windows), require far fewer lights (robots can work in the dark), reduce the number of employees needed to staff the place (a + or - depending on your point of view) among many other long-term cost-savings.
That's awfully convenient... for pretty much everyone but the students who need to browse through the stacks to do their research.
The ability to browse is the reason I still go to bookstores and libraries, even though almost every book you'd ever want is available online.
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That's awfully convenient... for pretty much everyone but the students who need to browse through the stacks to do their research.
The ability to browse is the reason I still go to bookstores and libraries, even though almost every book you'd ever want is available online.
If you're browsing through stacks still, in this day and age, you're doing it wrong. In a world of databases and search functions, it's much more efficient to browse electronically, and request all the books you think are worth investigating. A well written search function, including related books (users who requested this book also requested X) would be much more useful than each individual having to manually perform the same search that 5,10,100 other people might have done.
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See: broken window fallacy [freedomkeys.com]. All those people who we no longer need as clerks can go find something more valuable to do.
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It is very cool, but come on! People are struggling to afford college for their kids, and universities waste money like this?! Sorry, we have to raise tuition another 5%, we have to pay off this robotic library. And people complain about the oil companies...
You have got to be kidding. This is exactly what Universities should be doing. Finding ways to preserve knowledge and make it available to whomever wants it. Until everything is digitized, this is a perfect way to make those books available in an as efficient a way possible. The students at the U of C are not about getting good grades and passing courses to get good jobs. They are about discovering and creating and investigating things that no one else has thought of yet. It's a research institution,
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As a graduate of the University of Chicago, I'd have to say that, like many things, the perception is very different from reality. I'd say the vast majority of the student body, like at every school, are pretty average. It's not
aristotle and causation (Score:2)
this might be a cause of why tuition is out of control.
however, you might wonder, why an organization that supposedly has limited budgets is spending money on these projects.
who benefits?
and who benefits when tuition goes up?
i humbly suggest learning about the mortgage market 2000-2008, then realizing the same thing is happening in education; hedge funds are creating a bubble so they can get rich. fuck the students, fuck the social contract. they bubble the student loan market; they securitize the loans, th
Why does everyone need to go to college? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Sarah Palin, that's why. Because Glenn Beck. Because Creationist Museums where people ride their pet dinosaurs. Because a large chunk of the US actually got excited about the world ending last Saturday. Because .02 cents is not .02 dollars. Because we're fighting two majors wars and a skirmish in three countries most US citizens can't find on a map.
Because everyone gets to vote. Everyone needs to go to college?! If I had my way, college would be free and citizenship would require degrees in history, economics and science. Why on Earth wouldn't we want the electorate in charge of the largest supply of nuclear weapons on the planet to be as well educated as possible?
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Most U.S. corporations that are big enough to hire decent accounting firms and lawyers are already paying far less than 35% in taxes. By some accounts, the average U.S. corporation is paying taxes in the area of 7%. I sure as hell wouldn't mind being taxed at that rate.
Taxes have been lowered on the so-called job creators for ten years now. Where are all the jobs that those lowered taxes were supposed to have created? Any why were there more jobs when taxes were much higher? (Fifty years or so ago, the top
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IIRC, GE got a credit this year!
Removes more than it adds (Score:2)
This system caters to the individual who knows exactly which book they want, but what about us who like to have an idea, go to the section and browse around? I have frequently gone to the library with a vague idea of what I'm looking for and leaving with books for that topic, related topics and often just something that caught my eye. This "progress" undermines a lot of the value that a library presents.
Besides, if I know exactly what I want, I can use my computer and Amazon to get most things without bei
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When you are wandering around in a library looking at random books in the same section.. yes, it can be a better search.
You should try it sometime.
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Re:Removes more than it adds (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Removes more than it adds (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep in mind, this is not really a book library. UChicago says it will "primarily house materials like serials, periodicals, and other materials that are already online, as well as rare and fragile materials that should not be kept on open shelves"
Which is to say, stuff you wouldn't go browsing for anyway.
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Oh but there's a HUGE shortage! (Score:2)
Didn't you hear about the shortage? it's been going on for, I don't know, about 15 years now. A huge, massive retirement wave is hitting the librarian industry! You should definitely sign up for an MLS degree, ASAP! There, you can learn psychoanalytic theories about the hermeneutics of student based factors derived classroom application methods, from somebody who has never heard of Linux. Congratulations, you are well on your way to a noble profession, where you will work in a stultifying bureaucracy where
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can't browse? (Score:2)
One of the benefits of sorted shelves are that you might find something you weren't looking for, but is related to what you were looking for. If I don't know which book is the best book on a subject, I'll just pick one and find it on the shelf, and look at the books near it on the shelf for something that looks appropriate to my level. I don't see how this is possible with a robot system.
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How do you choose a book on e.g. Amazon? Do you need to know the exact name of the book?
There are computers there. Just have a simple web interface that lets you browse books by genre, topic, similar to others, authors, etc.
Seriosuly? (Score:2)
There is no future in paper books.
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How is this news? (Score:2)
california also went bankrupt (Score:2)
are you trying to tell us that the rest of the country is going to follow suit?
Temptation (Score:2)
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Then why do online book stores have so much success, if they suffer from the exact same problem?
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Marketing.
It's also why so many people buy and eat food that is bad for them. Why so many think they have to spend upwards of $70 for television or a similar amount for phone service. It's new! It's cool! You must have it! Now! Don't be the last one on your block to get it!
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On the other hand, you can "browse" the catalog of currently-checked-in items from your iPhone on the subway, order those you need, and pick them up within seconds of reaching the library.
Or, you can spend hours going from shelf to shelf finding that things you need weren't re-shelved, if they were checked in, if they weren't subsequently stolen from the stacks.
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Maybe you're unfamiliar on how libraries are used these days.
With the Internet, most research can be done online, with just occasional references to physical books. When that happens, it means you have to go wander the library and search through the shelves for the book. With the book found, you can head back to where you started (study/research group, computer, wherever) and continue.
This system cuts down the wandering in the library, the searching the shelves for the book, and possibly losing your spot
libraries are becoming thought control centers (Score:3)
Old days:
Step 1: slip into the library bored on a friday night
Step 2: go find books on nuclear weapons, magic mushrooms, bizarre sex acts, medical anomalies, etc. read to your hearts content.
New days:
Step 1. login with your government provided username and password
Step 2. click on the warning notice that says all your activity is monitored and unauthorized activity will be punished
Step 3. search for stuff.
Step 4. try to tell yourself that everything you search for is not being stored in some database somewh
Interesting Concept (Score:2)
I like the overall idea, however according to the video, it seems like you still require librarians to sort through a bin of 100 books for the book you requested. I know that this is probably the first automated library of this scale, but if your going to spend the 81 million, you might as well make it totally automated without human interaction.
On a positive note, the library really does look like a library from the future. I would love to go there and read books on my eReader.
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Well, probably handling a single book would add several degrees of complexity:
I went to this library (Score:2)
I went to the Arcada section of the library and there was a guy laying shot and bleeding on the ground. I went to help him and he said "Astral body".
Anyway I had the computer retrieve the "astral body" cartridge. Stupid library didn't have anywhere to play the thing though.
Choo Choo Ch'Boogie (Score:2)
You reach your destination, but alas & alack
You need some compensation to get back in the black
You take the morning paper from the top of the stack
And read the situation from the front to the back
The only job that's open needs a man with a knack
So put it right back in the rack, Jack
Amen. Nothing beats perusing physical media.
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As someone who's spent a lifetime in books, much of it spent in the University of Chicago's Regenstein as a matter of fact, I used to be a firm believer in the supremacy of physical books.
My mother-in-law sent me a very nice eBook reader, and little by little I've really come to appreciate it. I can even take eBooks out of the public library.
It's no good for musical scores, and I can't read it in bed with the lights low so I don't disturb my wife (eInk is not backlit
The library of the future . . . (Score:2)
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Really? (Score:2)
Astounding (Score:2)
I bet you won't find it predicted in Astounding back in the 1940s that we'd have robotic fetchers by the year 2010.
Somebody in Chicago invented time travel back in 1940, zipped 70 years forward to see how humans and AI were getting along, saw the library, returned to the time of origin, then destroyed the machine, since the future was too sad to contemplate.
the library of the future (Score:2)
Will also offer *free* electronic copies of ALL their books, to go along with the paper ones.
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Will be installed in your head at birth, and updated either on a schedule or manually, as you desire.
Unless all available storage and bandwidth are taken up with virus definitions, that is.
In 1950's Amerika... (Score:2)
Books bring robots to YOU!
Main branch of the New York Public Library (Score:2)
The main branch of the NYPL uses the same system, albeit more floors that aren't as tall, and human workers handle pick and place.
An original illustration here, sorry for the ugly url: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PotguXM3PJk/TKh0YeRyQMI/AAAAAAAAF_c/WiOrMXEWdQc/s1600/nyplstacks.jpeg [blogspot.com]
How about spending $81m scanning books ... (Score:2)
... so I can retrieve them, as well as search, copy (!), and do everything else I can do with data on a computer, from anywhere.
Death of the service industry? (Score:3)
When manufacturing jobs started disappearing the comments from many were that everything was ok and that service related jobs would take their place, now the service related jobs seem to be going away too (McDonalds last week announced it was replacing cashiers with touch screen kiosks in 40,000 restaurants). What happens now? While I like progress and advancement in technology, it just doesn't seem to be very well thought out, if you eliminate jobs in the name of efficiency eventually you also end up eliminating a sizable portion of the customer base. You can have 100% efficiency but if there is no one left who can afford to buy what your selling your business is going to fail.
Spain is what happens now. (Score:2)
Spain has something like 40 percent youth unemployment. They just had a bunch of massive protests.
How many watts.... (Score:2)
Browsing (Score:2)
Maybe good for some things, definitely not for all (Score:2)
Sure, if you know what book you're looking for it's great. But if you're looking for something for which you may need to sort through a shelf or two of books, it seems like this would make it tougher to just pull a book down, browse through it, and move on to the next. I also remember many hours spent leafing through various works of fiction, looking for something I might enjoy reading by reading a few pages here and there to get a general idea of the author's style and the book's plot.
Of course it's acad
Except... (Score:2)
Except, when I'm in a library searching for a book, I often run across something sitting on the shelf, that I was not searching for, that is equally or more interesting. The filter bubble comes to the library. God forbid anyone should expand their horizons by reading something they were not originally looking for.
As for robotic personal shoppers, the same thing happens when I'm in a store. I often run across something I like, or something I forgot I needed while looking for something on my list.
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I love the "Excluded from inclusion in MARS are:" title, especially from a university. They probably mean the documents have been included in the exclusion list for MARS inclusion ?
Fortunately, the MARS mechanic robots can take advantage of the university level of altitude to fetch books at a high rate of speed.
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Because ebooks often come with horrible DRM and/or onerous restrictions on resale and lending. Any library that considers itself to be a serious store of knowledge (as opposed to merely a resource for current patrons) will want to avoid that and right now for most titles the only way to avoid it is to stock paper copies.
Maybe a compromise could be to allow the library to keep DRM free copies internally but require them to use DRM when lending them out. Having a library lend out DRM free digital copies is pr
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That day is today, and the device is a Kindle. Can hold literally years worth of books. Battery lasts a month. The library should have the stacks for sure, but you should also be able to click a button and have the digital version sent to you.
exactly. they just removed anonymity from library (Score:2)
people say 'oh they wont track what you get'. uhm yes they will. they do already.
when Alex Jones starts actually making logical sense, you know this country is in trouble.
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That's awesome. You're 100% correct. I don't know how books are sorted these days, but the relevancy of nearby books is why I attend libraries.
At my (European) university we have a system where, instead of one big library, we have many small, specialized libraries. This seems to work fairly well if the librarians are good... they keep the shelves updated and know what should go near what.