Watch an Automated Library Robotically Retrieve Your Books

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Watch an Automated Library Robotically Retrieve Your Books

Total delivery time? Five minutes.

These adorable library robots can be programmed to tell stories and hold conversations, but can they fetch an obscure journal from a vast collection of obscure journals, books, documents, and assorted physical things? Don't hold your breath.

You're looking at the Repository Library at the National Library in Norway's automatic storage and retrieval system. It's oddly soothing, right? There's something wonderfully Kubrickian about that one-point perspective shot around the 20-second mark, as the crane glides into the middle distance, deep into the stacks, without so much as a whirr. It almost reminds me of the cake-making robots (cue Kraftwerk) that reinforced my colleague Ben Richmond's love of cake and robots. I guess this stokes my affection for documents and mechanized cranes?

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In an era of archive fever and strapped library and information science budgets, these sorts of systems are increasingly being brought in to meet the needs of high-density storage and to streamline document flow. There's the University of Missouri Library's RooBot, the robot library at Australia's Macquarie University, among others. Perhaps the most striking, if not the most complex, of modern automated library retrieval systems is the five-story underground robo-library at the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago:

Designed by engineers from Dematic, a firm whose automated storage-and-retrieval systems have attracted the likes of the likes of Ford, Boeing, and IBM, the UofC's $10 million robotized library can hold a whopping 3.5 million books, according to a  case study report from the company. With 24,000 book bins (each capable of housing roughly 100 normal-sized books) and a dozen 50-foot tall metal racks, it fits into into one-seventh the space needed for a traditional stack arrangement. Its robotic cranes are 55 feet tall.

Dematic has these systems in libraries around the world. They're all unique, but the process is generally: You call up whatever you're looking for on an online card catalog, which then passes the request to Dematic's system and flags where your item is in the racks, to pinpoint the specific bin and compartment.

Then the cranes get to work. There are five of them; four serving two rows apiece, and one serving a pair of double-width rows, all gliding along the length of the underground structure on an inlaid rail network. They can move up and down, and side to side at once, and are guided by a programmed logic controller initially designed to coordinate assembly lines at automobile plants.

"It's like a big matrix," Todd Hunter, who heads up document management at Dematic,  told PopSci.

Eventually one of the cranes lands at the flagged bin, at which point the crane juts out a pair of pins, catching the container's metal handles. Then the crane extracts the bin, pins hooked, and places it on its platform before passing off the good to a lift. The lift then passes your item through one of five slots in the ceiling of the vault, right to the circulation desk.

Total delivery time? Five minutes. About the same amount of time you'd need, in other words, to just find the bloody thing yourself, if you knew what you were doing.