A modern automated robotic library has opened in Chicago

I remember when I was a student, and came to the reading room for a book or magazine, sometimes I had to wait for my order in the reading room for 30-40 minutes or more. It is good if I had all the data on the book, and I could make an order. But if only the name and the author were known, it was necessary to go to the catalog, rummage through the card file, write out all the data on the sheet (and the catalog, by the way, is located in another building of the institute), and then go to the reading room to get their order. It could well be that there was no data, or the book was handed out, and then I had to go back to the catalog, look for something to replace. In general, the procedure is still. And now I envy the students of the University of Chicago with white envy who have at their disposal an ultra-modern robotic library that can find and issue an order in just five minutes.

The library tried to create a catalog of publications and in electronic form to make it easier for students and teachers. But if there is no any publication in electronic form, then the reader can place an order directly from the PC, sending a request to the repository.
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The heart and brain of this library is a five-level vault, where everyone is in charge of automata, people are not needed there. By the way, the repository is located underground. All books are compactly folded into special metal shelves, 100 books per rack. According to the developers, such racks are seven times more compact than regular library shelves. There are about 35 thousand of such racks in the storage, and the number of books and magazines stored there is about 3.5 million copies.



Of course, the storage is kept constant humidity and temperature, which allows you to keep books for a long time in good condition.

As soon as an order is received for one of the books, one of the five robotic cranes starts working, looking for the right book in the vault. As mentioned above, everything is fast enough, on average, it takes five minutes from ordering to issuing a book in the reading room. There is no need to rummage through paper catalogs, there is no need to jerk the librarian asking about this or that edition or confusing it with incorrectly recorded data. Everything is very clear and fast.

By the way, the library cost the university $ 81 million. It remains only to envy the university, which is able to spend such a sum on the equipment of such a library. Of course, now everything is going online, and let's hope that in 5-10 years most of the literature will move to the Web, but so far the libraries are not going to disappear, and such solutions are very pleasing.



Via singularityhub