Carl Piraneo works at the "bookBot" at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Photo: Allen Breed / AP
The library is a changing and I trust it is going to look a lot like the new James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University.
Designed by the Oslo-based firm Snohetta, the 5-story library includes little of what one would expect in a traditional library.
Yes, there is an area within the library that houses about 40,000 books. The rest, all 1.5 million of them, are housed in 18,000 metal bins. Four robots navigate the bins to retrieve requested books. The books are stored by size and not by traditional methods.
Photo:Allen Breed / AP
The structure contains a 300ft glass wall and other walls made of whiteboard. There is snack bar on the first floor and there are 20 different styles of chairs and 100 different collaborative study areas throughout the library. You can eat, you can drink and you can talk it up all without consequence. You can even move the furniture!
Photo:Allen Breed / AP
Here is a video of the bookBot in action:
2 comments:
This won't work, and I'll tell you why.
It sounds super convenient and futuristic, but people like to browse. And academics *need* to browse. Book organizational systems like the Dewey Decimal System are designed to encourage browsing by putting like-topic books together, and academics value this because they can find books they might not know about on their topics.
The only way this would work is if you could browse in the online catalog. But (our dirty little secret) online catalogs are absolute shit because no one wants to do the hard work of maintaining the records properly - most of the work is outsourced to untrained technicians - and to make sure that you can use it to do serious searching besides just looking up a shelf location of a book you already know you want.
Very cool. I worry though that during some crisis or apocolyptic event, lack of power will make books unfindable.
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